Lawyers- a general question

[Bernadine]

Say you have 30 days to file something (a response to a petition for divorce, for example, lol). Would you wait until the last minute to respond?

I'm hoping against hope that xh doesn't respond and we can just get a court date and settle things. His 30 days to respond are up tomorrow. I would think that his lawyer wouldn't want to wait until the last day, right?

[Deleted]

I think it's common to wait until the last day.

[Deleted]

Yes, I would. We never file things earlier than the deadline. I don't even like to file things early in the day on deadline day.

(Note: my practice has nothing to do with divorce.)

[starlily]

I'm in a different area of law, but I knew some attorneys would, just so the opposing counsel won't have time to file a reply to the response. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but some lawyers like riling up other lawyers for the heck of it.

[Bernadine]

Damn! If he responds, we go back and forth to figure out a settlement before getting it finalized by a judge. If he doesn't respond, we go right to court and I pretty much get what I'm asking for, as long as it isn't unreasonable.

[Deleted]

Dec 20, 2012 18:32:50 GMT -5 starlily said:

I'm in a different area of law, but I knew some attorneys would, just so the opposing counsel won't have time to file a reply to the response. It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but some lawyers like riling up other lawyers for the heck of it.

I wouldn't even say that we do it to rile the other side up or play games. We just see the deadline as the day on which we do the thing. We'll either take the extra time to revise/fact check/etc., or because we tend to have several things going on at once, maybe the thing that will only take a few hours but is due 30 days from now goes lower on the priority list until closer to the deadline.

Kind of like in school -- if you have a paper due on December 21, you aren't going to turn it in to your teacher on December 18 just 'cuz. You're going to turn it in on December 21 like the rest of your class does.