My family and I flew over an ocean yesterday. We’ve only ever done that a couple of times before, and it reminded me of the importance of Trust.
I was trusting the lives of my children, my wife, and me to a pilot that I had never met and knew nothing about.
If he or she did not have the proper education and training and experience and judgment, everything would be over. If he or she were not dependable and decisive, when needed, there wouldn’t be a tomorrow.
And all of that reminded me of the Trust that a person needs to have in the attorney that he or she chooses to represent them in a Divorce or Custody case.
You can literally lose virtually all of the things that make up your life and the lives of your children in a Texas Family Court. A Judge can take your house, your retirement accounts, your collectibles, your cash, and your children from you.
So, hiring a lawyer that can be trusted and that you trust is critically important. You are trusting the lawyer and his or her firm, if they have one, with everything. You need to have a lawyer with all the same attributes that the pilot needs – education, training, experience, dependability, decisiveness, and judgment.
And you need a lawyer that cares.
Maybe that’s the difference between choosing a divorce lawyer and choosing a pilot. If the plane goes down, God forbid, the pilot has lost it all too. In a Divorce or Custody matter, you may lose everything, but your lawyer will not.
So, in addition to finding a lawyer with all the attributes mentioned above, you must find one that cares about you and your family and doing the best possible job for you.
The good news is, unlike with a pilot, you can often find out a great many things about the lawyer or lawyers that will be helping you.
At our law firm, all of our lawyers have a webpage devoted to them. You can find the links to those pages here. And on those pages, you get to find out a little bit about what kind of person each attorney is. You get a sense of why you can trust them to do what needs to be done for you.
I have been lucky and have hired some great attorneys to represent me throughout my life for various personal matters – and I have also had the misfortune of hiring some bad ones.
In retrospect, I think the thing that distinguished the two groups was almost always the extent to which the lawyer truly cared about my family and me. Those that did, I have been thrilled with; those that didn’t were a nightmare.
Hire someone you can trust. Hire someone that cares.