When you have decided that divorce is inevitable and you lawyer up, you have a choice to make. And it’s an important one. You have two paths you can travel. One involves negotiating prior to filing a lawsuit, with the hope that your marital issues can be resolved in a document called a Separation Agreement. The other is sending your lawyer to the courthouse to file a lawsuit and begin the litigation process. Two things should drive this decision: how much money do you have and how much emotional energy are you willing to spend? There are certainly those cases where settlement just isn’t an option, usually because the two sides have too much bitterness and anger or the two sides are just too far apart in their perceived outcomes. If your case is one of those, you might not be able to escape court. Most cases, however, can be settled without court action. In fact, most cases settle anyway, whether a lawsuit is filed or not. So if you’re one of those folks who is either limited in money or emotional energy, you would be wise to consider hiring an attorney who has an eye on the ultimate goal of the CLIENT, which is a fair settlement, and not an eye on how much money he or she can extract from you by keeping the hate going in a long, drawn-out court proceeding. It is easy to find such an attorney. They are everywhere. They will join in the spouse-bashing and agree with everything you say. They will not tell you about the potential limitations of your case, the negative effects of handling a case that way on your kids or advise you not to go to court. Instead, they will talk tough about ‘destroying’ the other spouse and his or her attorney. And in the end, you will likely get about the same outcome that you could have gotten for far less money had you hired an attorney who focused on YOUR best interest instead of theirs.