How can a person keep their costs under control as they go through their divorce?

The biggest piece of advice I can give along those lines is for the people in the divorce to get comfortable with the idea that you have to compromise. Nobody wins in a divorce. It’s a question of how effective we are at controlling the universal loss.

The only people that benefit from a long and protracted divorce case are the lawyers because we’re getting paid for the time that we invest in the case. In our California system, 50/50 is the base rule. And the sooner that participants in the case realize that they need to give a little to get a little, the sooner the case is going to get resolved and the cheaper it’s going to be to get it resolved.

John Harding is the principal of the law firm of Harding & Associates in Northern California. He practices family law litigation and divorce mediation exclusively.