Reading glasses on pile of files

Legal Resolutions 2014

What’s your plan for 2014?

We have all thought about, read articles, posts and tweets about and possibly made resolutions for the New Year for our personal life.  For our professional lives and businesses we review and make business plans for the New Year right now.    What are you thinking about?  Do you have a business plan or have you made a resolution or two?

It’s not easy looking at the past and deciding what changes to make for the future in our personal lives or business lives, but it’s worth it.  I think the purposeful consideration of what you are currently doing, figuring out how it is working and making plans for the future is time well spent both personally and professionally.

But, I haven’t seen any resources to help make ‘legal resolutions’.  I’ve taken resolution and business plan principles and come up with an outline to help you make your Legal Resolutions and Strategy.  I’m suggesting that you make some time to look at your legal goals for the year and decide if you need legal advice about pursuing a family law question, considering divorce, your ongoing divorce, child custody issue or child support question or are you considering filing for divorce?

Legal Resolutions and Strategy

  • Goals for your year – annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly

  • Goals for your case – your primary goal for your issue or case, time frame for conclusion of your issue or case, the way your want to work through the conflict – litigation, arbitration, mediation, collaborative law, what is not important to the conclusion of this case, decide what are the primary things that you value in the issue – time, cost, people?

  • Write your goals down

  • Communicate your goals to your lawyer

  • Vision for the conclusion of your case – how do you want to accomplish your goals, how do you want that to look when it is finished, do you have relationships that you want protected during your case, whose advice do you value, is your attorney handling issues the way you would like, how would you like to communicate with your lawyer

  • Social media plan: As a family law attorney, I tell our clients to stay off social media.  A good rule is unless you want it on the front page of your local newspaper or their website don’t post it – anywhere.

  • Financial – how much do you know about your income, expenses, assets and liabilities? What are your financial goals? Do you have a budget?

This exercise, even if you don’t know all of the answers to the questions that you ask yourself will help you.  Just working through this outline will help you begin to get a vision of how your want your family law and divorce issues to look in 2014.  When you have your vision and goals for the year you know where you want to go.  You have your destination. Then the other decisions along the way are like choosing between freeways and back roads on the way.  You can decide how you want to reach your goal, when you know what it is.  You will be better equipped to make decisions with your goal in mind.

Your work on your strategy and plan now, is the beginning of your work on the decisions about how you want to arrive at your destination throughout the year.  And, I believe, that once you have your vision and destination firmly in mind, you will be better able to make decisions along the way.  And, of course, discuss your goals and decisions with your attorney.

Please call to make an appointment to see Jill O’Connell at 940-497-5454 about your legal resolutions and goals this year.  This is not legal advice.