When Your Attorney's File Closes

There is a moment nobody prepares you for, and it is not the hearing.

It is the week after the decree, when you have a question about the document you just received, and you discover that the person who has been answering your questions for a year is no longer your lawyer.

The handoff nobody names

In most family law engagements, representation ends at entry of the final decree. That is what you hired the lawyer for, and it is what the fee agreement usually covers.

What happens next — enforcement, contempt, clarification, modification, appeal — is typically a separate matter. Sometimes a separate fee agreement. Sometimes a separate lawyer, in a different specialty.

None of that is unusual or improper. It is simply how the work is organised, and almost nobody explains it at the point where explaining it would help.

So you end up in a gap: the decree is entered, something about it isn't working, and the person with all the context and all the files has closed his.

What I would ask before the file closes

If your matter is still open, this is the highest-value email you can send, and it costs nothing:

1. What, if anything, is still outstanding under this decree — deadlines, transfers, refinances, sales?
2. Which of those has a date, and what happens if the date passes?
3. Does your representation cover enforcement, or is that a separate engagement?
4. If it's separate — is that something you do, or do you refer it out?
5. What should I be watching for in the next 90 days?

Ask it in writing. Ask before you need the answer. I did not ask any of these, and the not-asking is the part I would change if I could change one thing.

If the file is already closed

Then you are where I am, and there are three practical moves.

Get the file. In most jurisdictions the client file belongs to the client and must be surrendered on request at the end of a representation. Ask for it as its own unconditional request — not as a fallback if someone declines to explain something. The file usually answers the question on its own, which is why it matters more than the explanation.

Ask factual questions, not interpretive ones. There is a real difference between "what does this provision mean and what should I do" — which is asking for legal advice from someone who is no longer your lawyer, and which he will decline — and "was this specific request presented to the court while you represented me." The second is the factual history of your own matter. It is a much harder question to wave off, and it is the one you actually need.

Build the chronology. One folder, in date order: what you asked, when, what came back. You will be handing this to someone. Assembling it now takes an afternoon; reconstructing it in six months from memory is a different and much worse task.

The specialty point

If your question is about how something was handled during a representation, rather than about the decree itself, that may be a different kind of lawyer than the one who did your divorce.

I am not saying that to imply anything about anyone. I am saying it because women in this position frequently take that question back to family lawyers, get a shrug, and conclude there is nothing to be done. There may be nothing to be done. But the shrug is not evidence of that, and a consultation with someone who works in that area is information-gathering, not an accusation.

What this actually is

Underneath all of it, the injury here is not usually money. It is not knowing.

Not knowing whether something was raised. Not knowing whether it was decided or dropped. Not knowing who to ask now.

Which is, I have come to think, the through-line of this entire subject. The gaps are the point. The thing you cannot find out is more important than the thing you can — and the correct response to a gap is never to assume it is your fault for not understanding.

It is to write the question down and find out who has to answer it.

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Part of From the Middle of It — notes from my own transition, written while it is still going on.