How To Make a Breakup Worse, From a Legal Standpoint

Most of the time, when a client who is in the process of a breakup contacts our legal team, they say they want to have an inexpensive, quick, cooperative, and peaceful divorce or parenting agreement. Then the following things happen and the process becomes expensive, prolonged, and ugly. Here are ways to make a breakup more difficult.

Engage in any type of physical, emotional, or financial violence or aggression. Get an Order of Protection to try to gain an advantage with parenting time. Report your partner to DCFS without a very solid safety concern. Interfere with parenting time for your partner and your children. Move out of the shared home before the process is finalized absent physical violence.

Leave the local area, the state, or the country with your children. Move in with a new significant other, or have a new significant other in your home. Introduce a new significant other to your children without advance discussion. Post pictures of yourself on vacation, at bars, or with a new significant person.

Stop paying routine bills, particularly mortgage, internet, and credit card bills. Try to persuade your partner to give up support or a portion of your shared assets. Speak negatively about your partner to your children. Refer to your children as “my” children. Quit your job, or try to hide money or transfer it to a friend or family member. Destroy or hide financial documents.

Get a new tattoo. Sign up for a dating app membership. Buy a weapon.

Try to “share” an attorney. Initiate court proceedings when you are angry. Expect to “win” or to take the other person “to the cleaners.”

If you do any of the things listed above, you and your children will lose, and the attorneys will profit. Follow this space next month when we talk about the things you can do to achieve the initial goals for a peaceful divorce or breakup.

Wakeman Law Group, PC

741 S. McHenry Ave.

Suite A

Crystal Lake, IL 60014

Ph: 815-893-6800

wakemanlaw.net