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When it comes to handling your divorce, family law matter, accident or injury cases, we have been helping people in Chesapeake, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and throughout Virginia since the 90s. While our primary office is in Chesapeake, VA, we are close to all of the courts and we frequently travel to them. Through the use of technology, we are able to assist you in your divorce as your divorce lawyers where ever you may be located.

The short answer is no - in Virginia you do not need a lawyer to represent you, process, file or finalize your divorce.  There is no rule or law saying that you do.  If one wants to file their divorce without a lawyer that is called being pro se.

There are advantages to having a lawyer represent you.  First, a competent divorce lawyer should know the process.  Like a sporting event or a board game, there are rules and procedures that need to be followed.  If you do not know those, then the outcome and results could be much worse than you desire.  

Second, knowing what the law is helps get you the outcome most beneficial to you.  A competent divorce lawyer can help guide you through the pretrial aspects as well as the divorce trial helping to manage expectations and trying to make sure that you are treated fairly.  Lastly, an experienced divorce attorney can guide you through the divorce process so that you know what to expect as well as help manage your expectations by letting you know what is realistic and what is not.

We will be the first ones to tell you that you should not believe half of what  your read on the Internet.  When it comes to doing your own reseach on divorce, separation, custody, visitation, child support, or spousal support in Virginia we encourage you to use the Internet to get some foundations.  The problems are two-fold.  First, you do not know who wrote the article/post.  Even if it is on the page of a law firm in Virginia holding themselves out as divorce lawyers that does not mean a competent divorce lawyer wrote the article or even proofread the article.  In fact, many firms outsource those articles.

Here, we write our own articles/posts on various aspects of divorce, separation, custody, visitation, etc., and have them proofread by someone else in the office before they are posted.  Second, each case is unique.  There is no "one size fits all" divorce or articles on divorce.  Each case should be approached on its own fact pattern and handled accordingly.  Articles and posts should be designed to be generic and informative but not legal advice.

Feel free to read our posts before your free consultation and we are happy to go over any questions you have at that time.  We invite educated questions.  The more that our clients know the better we can help them achieve their goals.

As stated earlier, there are several types of divorces in Virginia that any competent divorce attorney should know and guide you through.  Below will be links to each of the types of divorce that I reference here.  This section is designed to be more of an overview to help guide you to the page that you believe is most applicable to your divorce.

Let's start with contested versus uncontested.  The simple difference between the two is whether there is a written Separation Agreement or Property Settlement Agreement between the parties.  This is an oversimplification of this type of Virginia divorce process as there are exceptations.  The most common is that child custody or visitation was addressed in the Agreement, however, things have changed and one party wants to have the Court determine child custody and/or child visitation.  This will result in a trial which, therefore, makes it a contested divorce instead of an uncontested divorce.

Feel free to read our posts before your free consultation and we are happy to go over any questions you have at that time.  We invite educated questions.  The more that our clients know the better we can help them achieve their goals.

While the details may be unpleasant to hear or read, I did a little digging about the marriage and divorce statistics for Virginia.  While we cannot attest to the truth of these statistics as we did not do the polling, we are relying upon the CDC for this information.  To investigate further, we will post the citation link below.