I've decided to get a divorce. What's my first step?

I've decided to get a divorce. What's my first step?

Once you've decided to get a divorce, your first step is to ask yourself: What process do I want to use to get a divorce? There is a default divorce process, and it's running to court and going to Family Law court and hiring two lawyers and letting the two lawyers take over your life and asking a judge, who doesn't know you, your spouse, or your kids, to make the decisions that maybe you want to make for yourself. That's the default divorce process. But you also have a choice to opt out of the judicial system and go into collaborative family law or go into mediation as a first step in divorce proceedings. It's important to sit down with your spouse and ask him or her: "What do we want to accomplish here?" "How much money do we want to spend on lawyers and what can we do with the money that we don't spend on divorce lawyers?" "How can we spend that?" "How can we spend that on ourselves?" "How can we invest that in our children's' education?" So the divorce process, the choice is the divorce process.