1. Anything about your sex life unless it was so extreme that is caused you great emotional distress. So great that you received psychiatric help for your distress.
2. Your political opinions. We don’t care. We have our own. Your political party affiliation doesn’t influence our dealings with you or any of our clients in the slightest.
3. Details of what is discussed or processed with your therapist. They offer the emotional support we cannot adequately offer. And we charge more per hour and do not accept your insurance plan.
4. That the financial documents we need to comply with the mandatory document exchange rules or to respond to specific discovery requests are all contained in a box or a filing cabinet and you are just too busy to go through it. If you want to drop all of that off at our office for us to go through the mess, we will require an additional retainer and be assured that we bill you for all of the time it takes to go through this and make sense of it.
5. That you expect immediate access to us at all times, especially on weekends or after hours. If you contact me then, there may be a delay in me getting back to you. When you in a moment of panic and stress, remember what we have discussed, use common sense and don’t act out of anger. I will help you Monday morning when we are open and the courts are too.
6. What you think based on what you find on Google about your case. Just ask me your question. Don’t mention Google. Once you do tell me that your Google research raised a question in your mind about what I am doing or the advice that I have given you, you are on my watch list. If you continue to show me that you don’t trust me, we will part ways. You have your choice of an attorney and I have the choice of who is my client. If all of the advice you needed was on google, why did you hire me.
7. Your Instagram username or your twitter handle. We don’t need to be Face Book friends. I am your lawyer; not necessarily your friend. It’s a professional relationship which doesn’t usually require seeing your selfies.
8. What your spouse looks like naked. We get that sometimes there are videos or pictures exchanged in an intimate relationship and that if we need them, we will ensure all copies are destroyed or exchanged so they cannot be distributed for unintended purposes. But 99% of the time we don’t need to see them, so please spare us.
9. What happened in your brother’s best friend’s cousin’s divorce. You don’t pay us a lot of money per hour to do something that could be handled by this “experienced” half acquaintance with no law degree, specialty or actual familiarity with the court where your case is or will be pending.
10. A complete inventory of all of your household items. Why you must get the instapot. Why the toaster oven was actually a gift. If you and your soon to be ex can agree on nothing else, perhaps you can at least get together and agree how to divide your stuff. Paying lawyers hundreds of dollars per hour to argue about used appliances is the equivalent of putting cash in the garbage disposal. We generally do not accept lists of personal property worth less than $500 or of significant sentimental value (like the trunk your great grandmother brought from Ireland when she came here or your baptismal bible. The appliances will go with the house. As a general rule, furniture and clothing are valued at yard sale values.