A Common Sense, Practical Guide to Divorce in New York

With the exception of the loss of a child or someone very close, divorce is often the most difficult experience anyone will have to negotiate in his or her life. But what turns it into the tragedy that it so often becomes is the legal nonsense that they will be exposed to when they turn to divorce lawyers. Divorce lawyers don't help. They only make things worse. That, unfortunately, has been the sad legacy that our adversarial legal system has bequeathed to divorcing husbands and wives. But it doesn't have to be that way. And it doesn't have to drag out for years or cost a king's ransom. A lawyer is not just an advocate-someone who uses the law as a weapon in a legal tug of war the object of which is simply to get as much as you can and to give as little as you have to. As this book argues, a lawyer is also a counselor at law-someone who will use the law as a common framework that divorcing husbands and wives can look to in their effort to conclude an agreement. There is a name for this. It is called divorce mediation and it doesn't take forever or cost a king's ransom.

A graduate of Colgate University and Columbia Law School, Lenard Marlow has spent most of his professional life working with divorcing husbands and wives, first as a divorce lawyer (he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers) and then, for more than thirty-five years, as a divorce mediator (he is a Past President of the New York State Council on Divorce Mediation). In addition to lecturing and putting on trainings throughout the United States, Europe and South America on the subject, he has written many books about divorcer mediation, including The Two Roads To Divorce, To Divorce or Not To Divorce and Common Sense, Legal Sense and Nonsense About Divorce.