Tag Archive for: Cheryl Stein

How to Avoid Knee-Jerk Responses

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Quite often during a divorce when the wife wants sole custody of the children, she will go so far as to completely mitigate what the father does. Sometimes, women who exert this behavior are stuck in their situation—mired in bitterness and the feeling that somehow they’ve been wronged. To her, the husband does nothing. When I ask more detailed questions and parse out the facts, I’ll find out that he does things like make the kids’ breakfast every morning and take them to school. That is not called doing nothing!

The wife will say she doesn’t care about child support so long as it means he will be out of her life. This is a perfect example of a client making overly dramatic, large-brushstroke statements in the beginning. This quickly changes when the numbers get crunched.

For example, one client initially told me she would accept significantly less in basic child support than the Child Support Standards Act dictates. She would also agree for her husband to contribute a lot less than his pro-rata share towards add-ons such as the children’s:

•uncovered medical expenses;
•child care; and
•extra-curricular activities.

Her hope was to make the settlement offer so attractive to him that he would agree to sign. In exchange, he would relinquish custody to her and she would get him out of her life as far and as fast as possible. He was not particularly a bad guy, and the parties even had a fairly decent rapport; she just did not like living in the “neither here nor there” in-between zone of divorce. She wanted resolution and closure to move on.

Over the next few days, she began doing her homework, crunching numbers and calculating how much she would need towards her children’s child care alone in subsequent years, and realized there was no way in the world she could shoulder it alone. She looked at her daughter’s smile at dinner one night, and all she saw were big, disproportionate buck teeth. She realized her kid would need braces, and that she would need help paying for that as well. With that, my client landed back on planet earth and out of the window flew her ideas about proposals that were unrealistic for her.

Knee-jerk emails often flood my inbox in the wee hours of the night when the kids are sleeping and clients don’t have the day’s activities to distract them—the anxieties surrounding their divorce and future envelop them. By the morning, they see the light and have often come up with their own solution. When a client is going through a catastrophe, they are overly sensitive to everything in the moment. My replies have to be carefully calibrated to help diffuse the immediate stressor.

I often tell my mediation clients that I am the facilitator: They have to reach their own agreement; ultimately, they both have to live with it. During the divorce, these couples are still quite familiar with the other person’s lifestyle. They are oftentimes the most equipped to come up with their own solutions.

I similarly remind my litigation clients that the agreement has to be palatable to them. They will usually be living with the consequences for many years to come. They need to prudently weigh and consider the agreement and not sign in haste and desperation.

Contact me today with questions or comments.

Cheryl Stein, Esq.
The Law and Mediation Offices of Cheryl Stein
Offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn
Phone: (646) 884-2324
E-mail: cheryl@cherylsteinesq.com

How to Get What You Want in a Divorce

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From the outset, I discuss with my clients what their bottom line is and what they are willing to negotiate on. Typically, in the beginning, the client wants everything but the kitchen sink. Over time, however, the way that bottom line ends up morphing is astounding, especially as the urgency to get relief from the situation envelops the client. Of course, the goal in litigation is to get the other side’s bottom line to morph towards you as much as possible. In mediation, it’s to get the clients to meet somewhere in the happy middle.

One of my clients wanted his wife to have a certain amount of life insurance, with him being the trustee. She agreed, with the stipulation that she be the trustee of his life insurance. He didn’t want that and realized it wasn’t important enough to him to delay the process. So, he chose to “pick his battles” and took this out of the negotiation altogether (even though that was originally his ideal end situation).

Another client wanted her husband to pay towards multiple extracurricular activities for their very young child, especially as he could more than well afford it. His position was that he would pay towards only one extracurricular activity that he thought most appropriate to enhance the child’s development at any given time. He was very obstinate on this point and would not budge. They had a joint custody arrangement, where ALL decisions relating to the child were to be made jointly, and both parents were very involved. She ultimately decided that if she allocated and budgeted her money carefully enough and cut down personal spendings in other areas, she could come up with the money to pay for the child to be enrolled in multiple extracurricular activities at a time, as was really important to her. We proposed that she would be responsible for all extracurricular activities above the one he agreed to pay for, but that she would also NOT need his consent. He resisted at first because it meant relinquishing some of his control and decision making. Ultimately, he begrudgingly acquiesced, and the parties signed off on it.

Those can be categorized as more “small ticket items.” Sometimes, divorcing parties start to feel such an overpowering desire for immediate relief and resolution, they start bending on “big ticket items.” For example, they may start offering to accept significantly less in basic child support than they are entitled to pursuant to the statute; or to pay a lot more (if they are the non-custodial parent to pay basic child support). It is critical that the parties are anchored, thinking it through clearly, and not “selling their shirts,” so to speak, for the immediate gratification of a speedy divorce.

As clients go home and crunch their own numbers, they seem to start analyzing their lives more. They think about their lifestyle and what they want in the short and long-term future—different things end up being important than what was initially thought.

In terms of negotiation tools, what people think is going to be important to the other party often isn’t. This is most poignant during mediations when each side fills out a separate intake form where they convey their desired results and bottom lines. I’ve had a wife say in mediation, “I know him; I know what’s important to him.” As the mediator, I knew that, in fact, it was something else that was important to him—something the wife would not have thought of—and vice versa.

Sometimes, during litigation, the other party’s responses to a settlement proposal focus on something that is such minutia to my client, we would laugh about it. That’s an important piece when bartering—each party can receive “his/her minutiae” and everyone can be happy.

Often when clients think through their situation, they calm down on their own. What once was a problem becomes a non-issue. So rather than throw fuel into the fire, let things simmer on their own. Be willing to morph your bottom line, and focus on what’s really important to you in your divorce negotiations.

Cheryl Stein, Esq.
The Law and Mediation Offices of Cheryl Stein
Offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn
Phone: (646) 884-2324
E-mail: cheryl@cherylsteinesq.com