Regardless of all the legal movies that portray the trial as the climax of a long legal dispute, trials are actually exceedingly rare in the United States legal system. Well over 90 percent of all lawsuits settle rather than going to trial, and divorce cases are no exception to that rule. In fact, a report by CBS news suggests that only five percent of divorce cases end in a trial. This is because settlements tend to benefit everyone. They shorten the process for the parties, give the spouses more control over the outcome of their case, and they lighten the load on the legal system. Although a case can settle at any time, one of the most common ways cases settle is after a pretrial conference.

What the Pretrial Conference Is

The pretrial conference is a meeting between the lawyers and the judge prior to the actual trial, but after the lawyers have finished doing all their investigations and building their cases. In some instances, the parties themselves will also be there, but that does not always happen. The idea behind the pretrial conference is that it gives the attorneys a chance to feel the judge out on contested issues on which the spouses cannot reach an agreement.

Suppose a stranger offered you $100 now or $100 in a year, which would you choose? Almost everyone would take the $100 now because of an intuitive understanding of something economists refer to as the “time value of money.” Money now is worth more than the same amount of money later, not just in the sense that instant gratification is nice, but in terms of actual financial worth.

Understanding why this is true and how to compare money across time can be important for divorce cases. After all, a person's intuition is enough to know that $100 is better than $100 later, but what about $100 now or $150 in a year? More realistically, what about a decreased child support payment in exchange for paying a greater share of the child's college expenses?

Why Money's Value Changes over Time

Divorce is often a time of strong, turbulent emotions for many people. These sorts of strong, negative emotions can often cause people to do things that they come to regret later. One increasingly common thing that people, especially jilted husbands, have begun doing in the wake of divorce is posting “revenge porn,” nude or revealing pictures of their soon-to-be ex-spouses on the internet. Until recently, revenge porn was a classic case of the law failing to keep up with the rapid pace of technology. People having their pictures posted were short on legal recourse. That is no longer the case. Illinois recently passed one of the most aggressive revenge porn laws in the country. The law criminalizes the posting of revenge porn, and has an exceedingly broad reach.

The Law's Effects

The Illinois revenge porn law creates a new crime formally called “non-consensual dissemination of private sexual images.” A person is guilty of that crime when they do three things. A person must:

Over the past few years, Illinois has gained some notoriety in legal circles for having one of the strictest eavesdropping laws in the country. In fact, the law, which governs the recording of conversations, was so strict that the Illinois Supreme Court eventually struck it down because of civil rights concerns. It prevented citizens from recording police while they were on duty, which many civil rights advocates believe helps keep police from abusing their authority. Following that decision, the Illinois Legislature drafted and passed a new law that was designed to avoid those civil rights concerns, while still protecting people's privacy. This new law is important for people going through divorce because many people unwittingly violate this law by recording their spouse in an attempt to gather evidence for their future divorce case.

Public Conversations and Private Ones

The new Illinois law breaks conversations into two categories: public and private. Public conversations can be recorded without concern. Private conversations, on the other hand, require the consent of everyone in the conversation before they can be recorded. This leads to the important question of how to distinguish between a private conversation and a public one.

The ideal of the 40-hour work week was based on the principle that workers would have eight hours a day at work, eight hours a day to spend at home with their families, and eight hours a day to sleep. While those exact numbers may have shifted around in the modern era, they still point to the idea that the two main places that a person spends his or her time are at his or her job and with his or her family. It is not surprising, then, that a divorce, which centers on changing family dynamics, can also impact a person's job.

How Divorce Impacts Businesses

There has not been a large amount of quality research done on the overall quantitative impact of divorce on businesses, but a recent survey by a British family law group revealed that six percent of people reported having left their job as a result of getting a divorce. Another 13 percent of people reported taking sick leave to help themselves cope with the divorce.