“Don't Be Dumb”: 57 Divorce Lawyers Share The Messiest Cases Of Their Careers

Dad and Mom are getting divorced. Dad has a great job and is personally wealthy. Mom is presumed to take the children ( Age 15 and 17).

Offered to split everything 50/50. She comes back and demands a ridiculous amount of Dad's personal assets. So, to counter Dad asks for custody of the kids (though he has no desire to have custody of the kids). Mom freaks out and agrees to settle for nothing in return for custody of the kids.

Lawyer cooked this up at a firm I used to work for. I once heard the lawyer on the other side brag about he "beat" my guy because was able to get full custody.

My Co worker's wife left him in one of the worst ways possible.

He was trying for a while to take her with him on a trip to Europe. Germany, England, Sweden, etc. She ultimately told him she didn't want to go because she missed her family on the east coast, so he goes without her.

He's gone for about two weeks, and when he flew back his wife didn't pick him up from the airport. He had to call another friend, and when he finally got home his apartment was a wreck. His wife had taken over half their belongings, drained their joint bank account, taken his stash of tips, and driven the car back to the east coast. This was easily $10,000, more if you count the car. To make matters worse she wouldn't talk to him at all for a few months after this, only responding after being threatened by a judge with separation because she wouldn't take his name off the car.

On top of that he found out later she had been texting an ex of hers and this guy actually flew out to drive with her back to the east coast. She was using a Google phone and since my friend was paying for it he could go online to see the activity.

Luckily he's very resilient, and after about a year things are going better than ever for him. Possibly the worst part though is that his now ex wife moved back and is trying to talk to him again. None of us are letting him talk to her unless she pays for a counselor, which she should be able to afford...

Well, I'm no lawyer, but a child of divorce. My mom, during her divorce, for some reason agree to move to Florida with her mother under pushing from my Father. She did so and it turns out that the alimony laws in Florida (at least at the time)favored men compared to the law in CT. If my mom had stayed in CT duty the divorce she'd have had lifetime child support and alimony, but instead is poor now, when my dad lives his life in upper middle class comfort.

My mom got played pretty hard beyond this but live and learn, I guess. Just pains me to see the lifestyle difference between them, when my mom deserves a better existence then what she got after raising 4 children and 25+ yrs of marriage (or relationship).

I just had lunch with a lawyer friend of mine and he told me this crazy story:

When he was an intern there was this divorce case where the woman was demanding her husband for child support. It was in a small city in Bolivia's highlands and both the husband and wife were shepherds.

Anyways, the husband asked the judge for a medical examination of his genitalia, turns out the "husband" was actually a woman. She was raised by her grandparents and they respected her preferences, for the rest of the community she was a boy. After her grandparents died she inherited the land and after sometime the neighbor offered her to marry his daughter (without knowing the guy was actually a girl).

She accepted and once she was married she came to an agreement with her wife: they will be married but they won't have intimacy.

After a while the wife got a lover and had three kids; the husband took them as his/her own. Some years passed and the relationship got really deteriorated so the husband asked for a divorce, things got ugly and she ended up telling the true in order to avoid paying child support.

Not a lawyer, but recently divorced:

My ex-husband got his dad to serve me my papers one hour before I was going on vacation for 3 weeks. That left me with 1 week to find a lawyer and do my formal response.

After finding out the minimum retainer for a divorce lawyer here is $10k, I realised as a female in a low paying job with no savings I couldn't afford one. I also started a new job that week, and couldn't get off orientation to go to the courthouse self help till the Wednesday, when I had 2 days left to reply. I also had to move out that week and find my own apartment.

By Tuesday night, I had a threatening email from his lawyer saying he would put in default paperwork so I got nothing. He also stated if I tried to fight it (divorce in any way), my ex-husband would counter sue me for my retirement savings and 2 'loans' he gave me over the last couple years. Ex-husband had already transferred all his savings prior to giving me the papers and since I didn't have access to a lawyer I couldn't have that investigated.

At that point, I was so stressed and intimidated, I agreed to accepting the 13 year old car and $4k lump sum, basically a no contest divorce at that point.

It took 14 months for the divorce to finalise due to the backlog in California. After such a dysfunctional 3 years with him and the way I was treated during the divorce, even with the stress I've dealt with I'm so glad to be away from him.

IANAL but my step dad screwed over my mom pretty bad.

He owned 2 companies and was easily pulling in like 300k. He traveled a lot and when I moved out after college they fricken sold their house and lived in a camper (not kidding) because they were in the camper anyway 90% of the time. My mom traveled with him and did the books for the companies. They planned to retire after 5 years and were gonna buy a newer house. Well, they ended up splitting up.

Long story short, he managed to get a lawyer that said the first company he owned "didn't count" since it was contracted labor and the second company, he pretty much just destroyed any evidence they he owned it and gave it to a friend. They divorced my mom was supposed to get like 50k but didn't even get that because he filed for bankruptcy right after. She is supposed to get like $600 monthly payments for a few years but that didn't even start yet because my ex step dad has to pay off the attorney first.

So my mom went from living a life albeit in a camper but still with a man making over 300k to working as a PCA making minimum wage living at my grandmas house in a beat up truck.

I work in civil litigation, so not divorce, but I had a case where part of the issue was the previous dangerous behavior of Plaintiff's dogs. My client believed that part of Plaintiff's divorce involved not allowing the dogs around Plaintiff's kids so we filed to unseal the divorce settlement agreement. The divorce was between two lawyers and it was a doozy of a settlement. They had two single spaced pages dedicated to splitting up family stuffed animals. It was pretty heartbreaking to read who would be getting things like Boots the Bear.

This is gonna be a sad post to read (the lawyer comments, not mine).

My $.02: I'd say that broken engagements are psychologically the most destructive, partly because no one listens to you unless you use the big D word. Try my years-long experiment: regularly tried telling strangers the same story using interchangeably the words "breakup" and "divorce" and monitored reaction differences. Not "hard science" scientific, but you'll see a DEFINITE difference. Point being, when you're engaged, usually at least one person is already mentally married.

I had a coworker during a divorce constantly say funny stuff on the phone in the shared workspace.

My favorites being “she wants half the dog?” Apparently they just bought an expensive dog a year earlier for about 1k and wanted 500 dollars. Not a breeding dog. She wasn’t interested in custody of the dog.

Also over the course of a few months i heard him on the phone getting his cable, water, electricity, and gas turned back on because he’s an idiot and the wife removed autopay and he never realized he had those bills even though she didn’t work. She paid all the bills with his money and he never checked the bank accounts. You’d think he’d learn after the first one shut off.

Also apparently for years she was paying her moms mortgage too so he thought he had money but they had nothing. He didn’t even know the password to his online bank account. He got nothing from the judge because he should have been monitoring his bills. She basically bled him dry before the divorce secretly until they had nothing.

Finally, after all that she wanted to get back her stuff from her house while he was at work because they didn’t get along so he left her the keys. Guess what, she of course took everything of value and trashed the place.

Basically he guy was an idiot. He got custody of the kids because she didn’t want them but since she didn’t work here basically was no child support worth anything.

Not a lawyer. The father of a kid I knew growing up owned his own trucking business with a net worth of $2.5 million for the fiscal year of 1999. He also owned 3 mobile home parks, I'm not sure what the net worth of these properties combined are but with all the units generated a total of $30,000 a month in rent. That number doesn't include taxes or fees of any kind, just pure rent numbers at the time.

So his wife was a stay at home mom and they file for divorce in 2000. The divorce was finalized in 2004. The husband signed over his trucking company and all equity other then the mobile home parks to his mother and instructed his mom on how to sell it all off. She put all the money from sales into a savings account in her name, she ended up getting about 1.5 million after selling it all. The judge couldn't touch any of this and at the end of the divorce the wife was given $250,000 and custody of the son. $200/week child support, no spousal support. After the divorce and the sale of all the husbands assets, he walked away with just under 2.5 million after paying the $250,000 because of interest on the savings account.

Not a lawyer, but there was this guy in the UK about a decade ago whose wife was divorcing him. They owned a business together that she was trying to take in the divorce so he ran up crazy amounts of debt in the business's name and canceled his life insurance. He then tied a 90 foot cord around his neck and a tree then proceeded to drive out into the road decapitating himself in the process. Wife then inherited a bunch of debt instead of his business and life insurance.

Friends parents bought a condo in Mexico with another couple. This couple divorced the battle was bad and they started to miss payments on the condo strata fees. So my friends parents would pay them but in their contract it states that ownership of the condo would be transferred like a 1% at a time every time one party didn’t make the payments. Friends parents hey we can just sell the place free up the cash for you guys. They don’t want to start paying the fees again. Now condo should be owned 60/40 but they didn’t take advantage of the situation so still 50/50 Ownership. Then things get worse for the couple they start fighting over everything in the divorce including who pays the fees on the Mexico condo. So a year later my friends parents own the whole thing. They even offered to sell. The divorcees spent all their money on lawyers they had to sell their penthouse apartment.

The wife picked a Friday night when the alcoholic husband was good and sloppy, and went a couple counties away to a crazy redneck bar where nobody knew her. She picked the biggest, drunkest cowgirl she could find, called her a b word and poured a beer over her head. The cowgirl beat the hell out of her... black eyes, swollen face, the whole nine yards. She then drove straight to the police station near her house and told the cops that she had been beaten and escaped from the husband. The cops went to the house, he drunkenly mouthed off not knowing why the hell they were there, and they kicked the hell out of him. He did a year in jail for domestic battery and “resisting arrest.”

This kinda fits here:

My friends parents were getting divorced and it was super ugly.
It went to court due to the accusations being made, her basis of the divorce was him cheating with the neighbour who was this stunning 20 something married woman and the mum wanting half of everything even though she had never worked and lived off the dad.
The lawyers deal was if he admitted he was cheating with woman things would be split equally and a small sum of money to be exchanged, she had signed this paperwork and it was handed to the court ready for him to sign, he signed it in court but then had a confession to make...

Turned out the dad was sleeping with the neighbours husband.
The deal was the woman not the man.
The mum lost everything in the divorce... as did the female neighbour.

Dad and male neighbour then moved in together and have been together since.

Edit - mum did not get with the female neighbour. She moved into friends house a few doors down and moved to a different place altogether a few months later.
Dad and male neighbour moved in together, next door to ex wife who then moved her now husband in.
They get on really well now, better than ever and even go for family meals together.

What's the one where the ex wife puts the shrimp bits in the curtain rods and then ends up getting the house when the move due to the smell?

I don't know if it is true or if it's an urban legend, but I was told the reason "2 Buck Chuck" wine sells for so little is because the owner of the winery and his wife got divorced and she is entitled to half of the profit so he sells it at cost just to spite her out of any money.

My sister is a divorce lawyer and I remember she once told me about a case she handled where the wife kept cheating on the husband with younger dudes and one day the husband had enough and decided to beat her repeatedly and sent her to the hospital.