Park Avenue Divorce Tales

One question I am asked often is "do you represent more women or men?"  The answer is: "it's about 50/50."  Many women, in my experience, initially express a strong preference for having female counsel, reasoning, "she will understand what I've been through!"   Not necessarily.  Just because an attorney is a woman, doesn't mean she's going to be warm, nurturing, and sympathetic to the wife's cause.  On the flip side, relatively few male attorneys are misogynistic jerks.  If you're in the market for a divorce lawyer (I'm so sorry), you should interview a wide range of attorneys, including both men and women, until you find one in whom you have confidence.  

One (much older) male lawyer of my acquaintance who shall remain nameless expressed his opinion on this point:  "Women shouldn't really want to be represented by female attorneys who have to haul themselves out of bed every morning, go to the office, and make a living in a competitive profession.  They aren't going to be sympathetic to the hedge fund managers' wives with full household staffs who spend their days shopping and getting manicures and pretending to be feminists.  What those women really need is to be represented by a chauvinistic a**hole like ME, someone who thinks women are ignorant and naive and need to be protected."  While this largely self-serving view is, admittedly, equally offensive to female lawyers, hedge fund managers' wives, and womankind in general, the really sad thing is:  he's not that wrong.  

Comments

[Rachel]

Hilarious! And true. I would be a very unsympathetic lawyer if one of those women walked into my office. Especially those who have never done a day's work in their lives but think they are 'entitled' to half their husband's hard earned money because they've grown 'accustomed' to it. Please! Get a job!

[Martha Snow]

Although I'm not entirely in full agreement with Rachel, I do understand her reluctance to be sympathetic with some of these women. I always think that the most spoiled, entitled types that I have met in New York living the big life always came from someplace in Ohio. Go figure.
Hard call. Many women think they were doing the right thing staying home with their kids only to find out many years later that they don't have any skills other than working behind a make-up counter. Not very pretty.
In the interest of full disclosure I had a man and woman represent me in my divorce. She had nerves of steel. Thank God!

[Karen]

Hi Rachel: Well, there are "those" wives, and then there are the "deserving" wives who threw themselves whole-heartedly into the notion that they were a real partner in the marriage, and they more than carried their weight even though they may not have been the major breadwinner. A lot of times those women got through many lean years with their husbands early on in the marriage. In a sweeping over-generalization, I find that a wife's sense of entitlement is directly inverse to the amount of effort she actually put in! And to those who require a HUGE Hermes handbag in which to carry around said sense of entitlement, I would tend to agree with you that, in the words of one of my (female)partners: "Job is not a four-letter word." LOL!

Hi Martha: I hear you....not so easy for even intelligent, well-educated women to get back into the workforce (or at least the well-paid workforce) after an absence of even a few years to raise children. That is certainly true in the law firm world in which I live. Glad you got through your own divorce -- hope life has returned to an even keel.

[Liz F]

It used to amuse me when I was a court reporter, that the toughest of the prosecuting solicitors for CPS were always women. While their male colleagues could sometimes fall for a sob story (particularly from an attractive girl), there was no point in playing for sympathy with any of the females because it would probably rebound.
I don't have a lot of sympathy with women who are married for a short time and then want a massive payout particularly if they are childless, but anyone who gave up a career to bring up a family and then gets left for a younger model, deserves every penny she can get! (ps this is not from personal experience, I hasten to add)

[JulieP]

What always got me when I worked in the field is that the women breadwinners were often worse than the men in terms of what they were willing to give their husbands in the divorce. It didn't dawn on them that, if their situations had been reversed, she'd be asking for the sun, the moon and the stars and that she'd get some of them.

[Karen]

Hello LizF: EXACTLY! I have always found that my male colleagues are more susceptible to the female clients' hardluck stories, whereas my female partners and I are more likely to take a rather jaundiced view of the situation. ("You're 38? Graduate degree from a fine university? Good health? Children all healthy and in school full-time? Get a job.") Now, keep in mind that this is not to say that they are not absolutely entitled to their full whack of the marital assets; what I'm talking about here is entitlement to alimony for a lengthy duration after a relatively brief marriage.

Hello JulieP: Yes, in cases of role-reversal where the wife is the primary breadwinner, I often find the wives in question to be shocked -- SHOCKED!!! -- that they might have a support obligation to their ex-husbands. Of course, in more "conventional" marriages the husbands are keen to minimize the amount and duration of support, but I usually don't have to enter into knock-out-drag-out arguments with my male clients to convince them that they ARE going to have SOME obligation; most of them accept that that is the law fairly readily, whereas the female breadwinners are almost uniformly appalled that the courts would even consider awarding their husbands alimony.

[Nan]

Whether Fitzgerald really said it or not, the rich really are different from us.

[Karen]

Hello Nan: Yes; they really are. Sometimes the differences are almost surreal . . .