Miami Divorce Lawyers Craft Marital Settlement Agreements

Skilled negotiation and mediation services yield positive results

The experienced and reliable Miami divorce attorneys at Rafool, PLLC can help if you’ve decided to dissolve your marriage and want the process to be as painless as possible. Divorcing your spouse is distressing enough; going through a drawn-out, adversarial process where you litigate every fine point can be truly overwhelming. Fortunately, Florida allows you to dissolve your marriage quickly and efficiently if you and your spouse can agree on how to settle your major issues. We are adept at reaching fair marital settlements that avoid court hearings. Under the best of circumstances, you could get a final divorce decree within 30 days of filing. Plus, a negotiated marital settlement is a plan you both support, so there’s less chance you’ll wind up back in court arguing over the same issues.

Advantages of reaching a marital settlement in Florida

A court in Florida cannot issue a divorce decree until the major issues of your divorce are settled, either by agreement or through a trial. These issues include:

  • Alimony
  • Child custody
  • Child support
  • Division of property

A marital settlement allows you to present an agreement to the court that you and your spouse have signed. If the settlement meets with court approval, it becomes the basis of your divorce decree. In other words, you have written your own divorce order. The advantages of reaching a settlement are many. It allows you to:

  • Save time — You are not limited by the court calendar. You schedule sessions according to your schedule and move at your own pace.
  • Save money — Because you’re not going to trial, you save on a plethora of trial preparation costs, such as document production, interrogatories, witness depositions, expert witness testimony and your attorney’s billable hours.
  • Maintain your privacy — Rather than file court papers and testify in open court, you meet behind closed doors. No permanent record of your discussions is kept.
  • Reduce stress — Rather than fight in court, you are cooperating in conference. Not only do you take the stress off yourself but you also reduce the toll your divorce might have on your children if they had to appear in court.
  • Have greater control over the outcome — A settlement only happens when you agree to it. You don’t have to sign an agreement you think is unfair. On the other hand, when you go to court, you risk getting an adverse judgment that you’d have to live with.

No one knows your family and circumstances better than you and your spouse, so it makes sense that the two of you together should have the greatest voice in how your divorce is resolved. A marital settlement allows that to happen.

How to reach a marital settlement agreement

There are three main ways we as Miami divorce attorneys can help you achieve a marital settlement during divorce:

  • Negotiations — In this traditional process, both parties have attorneys advocating for them as they search for a solution to their conflicts.
  • Mediation — A neutral third party guides the spouses toward an effective and manageable compromise.
  • Collaboration — The spouses pledge not to litigate their divorce and retain attorneys who likewise will not go to court with them. This agreement locks the spouses into a cooperative process toward a settlement. If one of the spouses reneges and decides to litigate the divorce, they both have to start over from square one with new lawyers.

Whether one or all of these methods are available to you depends on the type of relationship you have with your spouse. The more respect and trust you retain for each other, the more likely these methods are to work. But, if all your respect is shattered, it’s more likely you’ll have to go to court.

Another route to marital settlement is to execute a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement. This type of contract is meant to settle all divorce issues ahead of time and can greatly facilitate a divorce.

Contact our Miami divorce lawyers to discuss marital settlement agreements

A marital settlement agreement can take a great deal of the stress and expense out of divorce and save you time. The experienced Miami divorce lawyers at Rafool, PLLC are skilled at reaching settlements even when conflicts between spouses seem insurmountable. To learn more, call us at (305) 567-9400 or contact our Miami office online to schedule an initial consultation.