Empower Yourself: Settling Legal Disputes Outside the Courtroom with Wendy Hernandez (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Wendy Hernandez, attorney and creator of Command the Courtroom. In the next five videos, I am going to give you some information on alternatives for settling your case outside of the courtroom. Without a doubt, it's better for you to take your own life into your own hands and resolve the case, if possible, with your ex-partner outside of the courtroom. If you don't settle your case, then what's going to happen is you're going to end up in front of a stranger, a judge, who's going to make decisions about your life and maybe the life of your children, your future financial life, after having heard about the history of your case over just a few hours. In extreme cases, maybe you'll get a day or two, or maybe three. That's still not a lot of time. The judge is still a stranger, and it's still scary in my mind to have a stranger making those decisions. I want to help empower you to take your life into your own hands and look at these strategies. The first strategy I want to talk to you about is just writing letters. It's something as simple as having correspondence with your ex over how the case is going to be resolved. Now, in an ideal world, it would be great to be able to have a conversation with your ex about how things are going to be resolved, but that's not always possible. As a lawyer, there are situations where I feel like I need to correspond with the other attorney. Maybe I want to make sure that I'm being clear about the offer that's being transmitted to the other attorney, and I want to make sure that nothing's assumed, that all the details are covered. The best way to do that is by sending an email or a letter to the other attorney. In other cases, maybe emotions are really high. There are situations where I just don't get along with the attorney, and you may find yourself in that situation with your ex where every time you talk, you end up getting into it. Well, those are situations when it's probably best to just send a letter or an email to the ex saying, this is how I propose that we resolve things. The first method in this first video is just simply getting clear about what you want, outlining all of the areas that you think you need to be resolved or that need to be resolved in your case, making an outline, and then setting out a proposal about how you want things to be settled. It's that simple. If your ex sends an email back to you and says, I accept, then really that's a binding contract under the law. You can take that and run with it and do what you need to do. There's some other steps that you need to take if you get a settlement in this way. One of the important things are that if you settle, your judge is going to want to see an agreement put into writing in a formal way, in a form that the judge is going to accept that's required by the rules of wherever you're living. You can take the letter you sent in your ex's acceptance and put it in the format that's required. Say you sent a letter and your ex sends a letter back saying, well, I agreed to point A, B, and C, but not to D, and this is what I'm proposing. Well, in that case, you don't necessarily have an agreement, but you may be closed. In that situation, I would recommend writing a letter back and saying what your counter proposal is, if you have one, or saying, yes, I accept to the modification that you're proposing to the letter. I settled a lot of cases just going back and forth with letters with opposing counsel or another party. It seems really simple. It might seem like it's old-fashioned, but you can get things done just by way of writing letters. So that is the first video in the series of videos about how you can settle your case outside of the courtroom. Stay tuned for video two of this series.