Divorce Advice from a Family Court Veteran
DIVORCE WITH LESS DAMAGE: Cook County judge Karen Shields left the bench three years ago to become a divorce mediator. Here’s what she has learned about limiting emotional and financial pain
Interview conducted and condensed by Jeff Bailey
Word around the courthouse is that your empathy for battling spouses comes from your own rocky childhood—that both of your parents were married and divorced a few times.
It’s true. My childhood was training for the job. There has been a lot of family upheaval. I left the bench before turning 60—I took a hit on the pension—but I felt that mediating these cases was the right way to go. If you go to court, it’s the judge’s decision, and you have to live with it. Judges have good days and bad days, like everyone else. To me, it’s so important that people make their own decisions.
Most people I know who have gone through a divorce said they wanted it to be friendly, but they ended up snarling by the end.
Mediation seems a gentler path. How often are divorces mediated in Cook County? You have to use a mediator if you can’t agree on child custody. But on finances, less than 1 percent are mediated.
How does mediation work?
We start out in separate conference rooms. Then I move [the spouses] to a shared room as fast as I can. A typical mediation takes 16 to 20 hours, spread over a few meetings. We settle on the kids first. The kids are most important. Plus, how the kids are dealt with affects the money.
According to Shields, in her courtroom, about one-third of the criers were men. In divorce mediation, “it’s more like half.”
What is the worst thing divorcing couples do?
Use their children. They might as well pick them up and bash their spouse with them. A fraction of parents called unfit [by a divorcing spouse] actually are.
A prominent divorce lawyer who recommends you as a mediator also says divorces in which only one spouse has command of the financial information aren’t suited to mediation. True?
No. It’s the mediator’s job to keep control equal. Knowledge can be dealt with. Financial advisers and attorneys can come to mediation sessions. And everyone needs a lawyer—at least to review the agreement.
What do you charge?
$450 an hour. I’m half the price of two attorneys.
What are your typical clients like?
Upper-income people like mediation [in part because] they like the confidentiality. But the middle class really needs it for financial reasons. Money gets eaten up. Houses—they’re all underwater. It used to be, “I want [the house].” Now it’s, “You take it.”
What is your strategy for getting couples to agree?
In mediation, I can often see the path they should go, but they need to discover it themselves. People don’t settle until they’ve gotten through the emotional process. While it’s me leading the process, it’s their process.
Sounds like psychotherapy.
At the end of the day, I’m exhausted because I’ve taken in all the couple’s emotions. Some days I’m catatonic. I need one glass of white wine.
Photograph: Bob Stefko
This article appears in the February 2012 issue of Chicago magazine.
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Thank you Karen for acknowledging there is a far better way and the government system and attorneys are doing more harm than good.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the average custody battle is actually $78,000 and I know people who have been taken for $750,000.
The first thing you need to know before getting involved in a divorce is that the entire industry is literally a scam. They do not provide any real value, and in fact cause destruction. Divorce lawyers, often intentionally, pour gasoline on the fire to generate legal fees. They are targeting your entire estate. This is why they get your financial statements ASAP. They are trained in an adversarial system, not meant for a civil divorce. Mediation is a far superior process and lawyers do not know how to do that. They profit from conflict.
The judicial system in all 50 states also gets kickbacks for child support in the BILLIONS annually. We have known for about 20 years from the scientific research that sole custody is a form of child abuse and drives up social pathological in children about 14,600%. Each of 20 problems goes up between 660% and 2,400%. See: http://www.parentalrights.org/ and www.BestInterestOfChildren.org. for the facts and sources of this data.
Teen suicide, teen pregnancy, drug usage, incarceration, promiscuity, crime, gang violence, mental health problems, rape and far more problems skyrocket when a child is placed in sole custody (usually without a father).
So here are recommendations from an experienced divorce coach who has been watching this system since 2004:
1. Seek to resolve as much as possible with your spouse directly in a business-like fashion with several scheduled meetings scheduled over 2 months or so. Keep communications open as much as possible. Do not abuse restraining orders to get leverage or your problems will snowball. Some lawyers will encourage this to guarantee a long and expensive custody battle.
2. Take what issues are left after step #1 to a mediator to resolve.
3. Let the guiding principle be as near equal time and custody for the children as possible given jobs. Split assets earned during the marriage 50-50 and assets brought to the marriage should generally go 100% to the party that brought them unless the marriage is over 15 to 20 years. Then some split of premarital assets may be justifiable.
4. Never pay any divorce attorney a dime but bring to the court a "stipulation" agreement so your fate is not up to incompetent and corrupt judges who want sole custody for the $100,000 per child they can get in federal kickbacks under SSA Title IVD. Never trust what a lawyer says. Judges and lawyers are the most prolific child abusers on the planet now due to this system. This is a fact, not an opinion, as each judge damages thousands of children each year thorough ignorance, incompetence and profit motives. Lawyers have fewer cases but HUGE financial incentives in each case to do this also.
5. Move on with your life as an independent person, supporting yourself with each parent paying an equal amount into a child bank account for all direct expenses (not to include each parents choice of home and lifestyle for luxuries, but basic minimums like food and clothing). Each parent can provide luxuries to the level they can afford and choose. This maintains the quid pro quo of parent-child and parent-parent relationships and may even save 40% of your estate that would go to lawyers.
6. Co-parent and support each other as parents, as you likely did in the marriage, so that children cannot split you for their benefit. Read up on this some and set some boundaries by agreement to respect each parent’s rules in their own household. These rules may vary but within limits.
Unless your spouse is a drug or alcohol addict, or physically abuses the children, 50-50 time with each parent is almost always best for children. The trouble from exchanges and having two of many things is dwarfed by the influence of both parents on their lives forever. No parent should want to seek total custody and control except in theses exceptional cases, as they are abusing their own children if they deny them access to the other parent. Do not be jealous, each parent provides unique things to each child. Use the free time to build your new life and friends. Wait at least a year to date as the impact on you is huge and hard to see yourself. Depression and other things are very common.
The #1 indicator, which dwarfs all others, as to how well a woman will do in a marriage, is the strength of the relationship with her father. Do not cause you child's divorce 25 years later because you picked the wrong person, grew apart or denied them their other parent. Stay friends with your ex, or at least civil for the children. You don’t have to party together but hide any animosity as best you can from the children and focus on your new life, not the past. They will prosper from this and so will you.
Print this list now and put it somewhere you can read every week until your divorce is done. This should take only 2-4 months if you follow these steps, versus many years and many tens of thousands of dollars in the legal system that could bankrupt you. Buy a car or pay for the kid's college with that money. Don't give it to unethical lawyers which encourages them to destroy the institution of marriage and our children.