Confessional

What your divorce lawyer thinks about you

I HAVE seen all sides of a marital split and while some couples surprise me with their decency, that’s generally when no one else is involved. Bring in a mistress or another man, and the gloves come off. Hurt, betrayed people want revenge. I have to tell them the law doesn’t run on vengeance.

It’s usually women who want to harm via physical possession. One client insisted she wouldn’t give up fighting until her ex had been forced to sell his cherished vinyl record collection. Angry men tend to withhold money.

Some wives are willing to bankrupt themselves in legal fees to make sure their cheating husband doesn’t ‘get away with it’. People lose all common sense when angry, which is why we insist on mediation, but we can’t force couples to sit down together. I’ve known women hire private detectives to spy on husbands or bug the car, thinking if he’s seeing someone they’ll get a better pay-off — but there’s no reason why they should.

The part of the job that upsets me most is seeing children caught in the crossfire. One wife refused to let her children see their father and encouraged them to claim they were frightened of him.

She kept saying they were ‘hysterical’ and, having been caught up in a horrible situation, they were. The father was distraught and lost thousands trying to fight her in court, all because he’d had a onenight stand. I don’t condone his behaviour, but what she did was unforgivable.

People think divorce lawyers are tough, but we’re nowhere near as brutal as a wronged spouse can be.