Episode Description
Most people don’t want a bitter, drawn-out divorce, yet many end up in one simply because that’s how the system is set up. Rock Rocheleau, a Las Vegas divorce attorney who has spent years watching couples fight over things they’d mostly agreed on, thinks there’s a better way to begin. His firm has built an approach around what he calls a “no-fight divorce,” and the idea is simpler than you’d expect.
In this podcast episode, Rock explains why the court system tends to turn a family problem into a legal battle, and why a single piece of paper can change how two spouses talk to each other. You’ll hear how his firm uses an online structured negotiation tool and an AI assistant to help couples understand the rules of divorce, trade proposals, and avoid having the kinds of conversations that make things worse.
You’ll also discover why he no longer bills clients by the hour, focusing instead on task-based flat fees. Those make the price of fighting more visible and enable clients to clearly weigh the cost of fighting over the value of what they’re fighting for.
Rock also gets honest about the limits of self-representation, alerting clients to situations where NOT having a lawyer could hurt their case.
Whether you’re facing divorce, are a divorce professional, or you’re just curious about whether there’s a less painful path through divorce, this episode is worth a listen.
Show Notes
About Rock
Rock Rocheleau is the managing attorney at Right Lawyers in Las Vegas, Nevada, a firm dedicated exclusively to handling divorce and custody cases. Rock and his firm stand out by utilizing flat-fee pricing rather than traditional hourly rates, bringing predictability and transparency to their clients. Recognized for their exceptional service and dedication to families in transition, Rock and Right Lawyers have been voted Best of Las Vegas Divorce Lawyer eight times in a row.
Connect with Rock
You can follow Rock on YouTube at @Rightlawyers. To learn more about his work, visit Right Lawyers, and to explore his new AI-assisted legal service, visit No Fight Divorce.
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Rock Rocheleau
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Transcript
How a "No Fight Divorce" Saves Time and Money
SPEAKERS
Karen Covy, Rock Rocheleau
TRANSCRIPT
Karen: Hello, and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making to try to figure out what keeps us stuck, and more importantly, how do we get unstuck? I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator, and arbitrator, turned coach, author, and entrepreneur.
With me today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Rock Rocheleau. Rock is the managing attorney at Wright Lawyers in Las Vegas, Nevada. Wright Lawyers only handles divorce and custody cases, and it's unique in that they only charge flat fees instead of hourly fees, which is something we're definitely going to get into in today's podcast.
Rock and Wright Lawyers have been voted Best of Las Vegas Divorce Lawyers by the Best of Las Vegas eight times in a row. Rock, welcome to the show.
Rock: Thanks, Karen! Thank you for having me. It's early in Vegas, and we're ready to roll here.
Karen: That sounds awesome. I'm excited for the conversation because you do things differently than most attorneys, and one of the things you talk about is a no-fight divorce. What is that? What do you mean by no-fight divorce, and how is it different than just an uncontested divorce?
Rock: Okay. It's the same as an uncontested divorce. I find that people don't understand that word a little bit, like it's some sort of reverse negative or double negative. You know this, there's two ways to get divorced. You can go to court, get an appointment with the judge, kind of use all their forms, and fight it out a little bit. Or you can draft a couple of documents, writing down your agreement, and then file it with the court.
Filing it with the court with just the agreements, that's called an uncontested divorce, or we've coined the phrase, no-fight divorce, just because it kind of relays not just what you're doing, but it relays an aspiration. I mean, I would think most people want a no-fight divorce. I'm not saying their position's unreasonable in that mindset, but I think most people, if they're going to have to get a divorce, why does it have to be a problem? So, we use the phrase no-fight divorce, I think, for about 6 years now, and it just kind of resonates with people. So, it's the same. Uncontested divorce. Some states call it a joint petition for divorce, right? A common word is amicable divorce. Non-contested divorce, I get that as well. We just kind of call it a no-fight.
Karen: Okay, I like the idea of a no-fight divorce, and I think you're right. I think most people, if given their preference, would prefer not to be fighting in court for years over their divorce. But there's a little bit of a nuance here that I don't think most people catch, and I think it's something that you and I should explore, which is that when you talk about an uncontested divorce, something like 90-95% of divorce cases end up being uncontested, in that they settle out of court, they don't go all the way to trial, right?
Rock: Higher, right? Like, it's probably even higher.
Karen: Yeah, it's hard.
Rock: I get it.
Karen: It's hard to get exact statistics, because every court system is its own independent unit, but what I'm wondering for this no-fight divorce: Do people have to know that they want a no-fight divorce and agree from the beginning? Because sometimes, a divorce can be contested for a while, and then people settle. So, what does your firm handle? Does everything have to be settled right out of the gate? Or do you also handle the cases where people might have some arguments or disagreements in the beginning, but it ends up being a no-fight divorce?
Rock: Well, we do both. We do both. Look, we love to promote no-fight divorce. It's usually the first word out of our mouths. I'm the managing attorney, and there's 4 other attorneys here. So we just kind of believe that why not start with that? And it's actually something that I'm trying to promote to other attorneys, you know, why do we have to start it with a fight? Why not start with the no-fight word?
So, we start with the no-fight concept, or the approach. It doesn't always work. I mean, I was on a call this morning with a client. We tried to start with a no-fight divorce. The husband doesn't want to let go. He participated somewhat in trying to work out some terms, but then at the end of the day, when you put the piece of paper in front of him, he wasn't going to sign. And you know this, you're a seasoned attorney, so what's going to happen? We're just going to now jump from the no-fight system, which is just documents and negotiations, to the court system. He's probably still going to settle, like you're saying. He's not going to pay his attorney $20,000, $30,000 to go all the way to trial for things that he really agreed to. He's just hurt, you know this, she left him. She left him, so he's mad. But you've got to get there to the contested case, and then he'll settle.
Yeah, we'll do both, but we start, and I think that's the problem in a way. I think the court system and the attorneys' divorce system is kind of broken. The first thing out of our mouths as attorneys is, "What's wrong? Okay, let's file a complaint, let's serve them." I have to do it sometimes, too, and I used to do it a lot more in the past, but now I just kind of go, why not just ask your spouse? Let me see if there's a no-fight that's possible. Why do we have to start this contested, and knock on the door, and serve them papers? Don't you always think that's weird when they're living together?
I'm like you, I've never been divorced, I've been married for 33 years. I think being a divorce attorney just makes you realize, yeah, it ain't better out there, whatever problems you think your spouse has, other people have just as many. But I've always found that weird, that they'll live together. They both want to, they might not even tell each other about a divorce, and then all of a sudden she comes and she hires you, or she hires me, and we file documents and we serve them to him. He opens the door that she's living in the house, and that's got to be the weirdest thing ever, walking around the kitchen.
Karen: Yeah, there's a lot of weird things, especially when you're going through a divorce, and to your point, you're still living together. It makes life more than a little bit awkward and uncomfortable, for sure, but let's say somebody wants a no-fight divorce in your process. What is your process? How do you start that? What does it look like?
Rock: Okay, so I'm going to give you kind of two things. We just built a website called NoFightDivorce.com that makes this a little bit easier. But prior to that, because it's only about 30 days old, we would have a worksheet. I realize you can't let spouses negotiate or talk about a no-fight divorce without some sort of prop. They need something to write on, they need something to document. "Well, you said I could have the Jeep, and I said I could take the quad," or otherwise the fight becomes he-said, she-said stuff.
About 10 years ago, we developed a worksheet that basically just says, here are the things you need to go through. It goes into a little more detail, but it's the five areas: custody, child support, assets, debts, alimony. So we use that worksheet to take the temperature. If you're going to go through a divorce, and you hear this all the time, right? Have you talked about it with your spouse? No. Okay, so you want to hire me, and you want me to file a document and serve him? No, let's have a discussion with him first. This is your spouse. This is someone that you got up in front of people to honor and to say in sickness and in health. You do owe him that. So we use the worksheet to start it.
Karen: Okay, but let's say you've got a couple who can't talk to each other, because often that's the state of the marriage when they're coming in for a divorce. The communication has stopped, right? If you've got that spouse who says, "I can't talk to my husband or wife," or "It always ends in a fight, I don't want to go there," can those people also have a no-fight divorce, or are they just out of luck?
Rock: Well, look, this is not going to solve everybody's emotional problems. It's not going to do it. Before, with our worksheet, no, you were kind of screwed. You were either going to have to talk to your spouse, or you were going to have to hire me, and let's face it, does anyone want their spouse's attorney calling them? No, in everybody's mind, that's kind of an aggressive move.
With the website that we've built, it's working. We're going to refine it a little bit, but you create your account, you put in what you want—child support, custody, assets, debts—and you send an email to your spouse. It invites them to come look at what your offer is. We're going to talk a little attorney here: offer, counteroffer. We don't really put it like that in the document, but it'll send your spouse an invite to look at your no-fight divorce offer. You get to look at it, and the website has AI in it.
We call him Max. He's been trained on Nevada divorce and custody law. It started with Maximus. We were trying to name our AI systems at Wright Lawyers after Greek gods. I don't know why everybody goes, "Do you have a thing with Greek gods?" I go, no, our first one was named Justice. She answers our phone, and that was kind of a play on words. Then the "IS" in Justice is kind of Latin, and so I built Max, and I said, let's call him Maximus.
Max is there on the website to answer questions, and he's not a hallucinating AI. Not to get too technical, he's in a box that's confined to Nevada law. He'll educate you on your spouse's offer. He actually educates the spouse on the initial offer. You can ask him anything, and we're going to start adding videos there to talk about nasty words like community property, equitable distribution, child support, legal custody. We're trying to educate these people.
I call it softening the dirt. If I watch a video and I say, hey, the 401(k), even in my name, she gets half of it. I may not like that, but maybe at least I accept that as the rules of the game. So he puts in his terms, he invites her, she looks at it. She can actually accept each one of the terms, and it's written in plain English, or she can make a change. We purposely don't use the word "reject." She can just suggest the change. We're trying to take out the inflammatory words. Then he can look at it, and if he accepts the changes, then boom, we have an agreement. If we don't, Max will actually create a summary sheet that they can take to their lawyers so that they can see what their sides are. So No-Fight Divorce is taking this a little bit to the next level than what the worksheet started out with 10 years ago.
Karen: Okay, so I've got a lot of questions. It's the lawyer in me. That's why I say recovering. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer.
Rock: Always got that beast in you.
Karen: So, you've got two people who are swapping settlement proposals, and they have no idea what they're doing. I mean, where does legal advice come in? Because what I can see happening, and from decades as a mediator I can tell you, people make agreements, and they settle, then they take it to a lawyer, and the lawyer says, "What was wrong with you? You gave up this, and this, and this," things they didn't even realize they were giving up, and then the whole thing blows up, and then it's worse, right? So how do you stop that from happening in your system?
Rock: You've got to educate them well. You've got to have a lot of stopgaps that say, hey, you're voluntarily signing this. This is you and an AI system. You may want to reach out and have the advice of a lawyer. Let's face it, Karen, it's not any different than—I don't know about your state and your legal aid system, but in Nevada, we have a very powerful legal aid system and court forms. They just walk in there, and they make offers all the time, and have no clue what the hell they did, and left out the house, and didn't think about the... So, this is not perfection, and I do think you're right, you should, with any agreement—not just a divorce agreement—if you don't know what you're doing and you don't really know if this is what you want to offer, hire an attorney. But this is just—I don't think it's any different than the self-help center forms, but it's at least better.
Karen: Okay, so the problem you're trying to solve is how to give people a way to do this themselves and keep lawyers out of it, that's better than what they're doing now.
Rock: That's it. Yeah, if they can. Look, there's a couple of things that I don't think you should ever use self-help forms or NoFightDivorce.com for. If you're trying to relocate with your child, and the other spouse doesn't agree, this isn't going to work, right? That's a binary argument, 0 or 1. Business valuations are probably too complex to really value your proper business. If you're uncomfortable with the alimony dollar amount, don't do it. If you really think your spouse is hiding money or there is marital waste, that's probably not going to work.
But all of the other things, this system's going to work just good, and it's going to work better than the legal aid system. It's always going to say, listen, do you want an attorney to review this with you? Take it, go review it. He got your offer, she got your offer, you guys couldn't come to an agreement, or you're uncomfortable with it, take your offer to this attorney, take this document to this attorney. But what it's really hoping, Karen...
So my wife is a family court judge, and that's a lot of what inspired this as well: people come into this court system without understanding that their positions are absolutely ridiculous. It's not really their fault. No one teaches us about community property in high school, right? When you get married, no one talks about what is joint custody and legal custody. It only happens when you're divorced.
I just think the court system has failed a little bit. I think the court system has set these people up to fight in general. Starting off with the attorneys filing these documents, but think about the court system. The court system is monitored. The door to the court is opened by a policeman. What the hell are we doing calling someone a plaintiff, but worse, calling someone a defendant? I mean, what crime did I break? That system's got some culpability.
Karen: Well, the problem with the court system isn't necessarily the court system, it's that it was not designed to solve this type of problem.
Rock: You're right.
Karen: The members of the court system, there's only one purpose: to decide disputes when people can't decide them themselves. That's it. Period, full stop. When you're taking what is essentially a family and social problem and dumping it into a court system that's only designed to be legal and give decisions, it doesn't work.
Rock: You said that really well. Agree 100% with all that. You're absolutely right. I never thought about that. I knew it was broken, I never really thought to say it like this: it's a social problem, it's a civil war that you're dumping into a legal system. Yeah, you're right.
Karen: Yeah, it's a family problem, and that's why the courts do it so badly. But beyond that, I mean, there's a piece of divorce that is indisputably legal, right? You can only get married if you have a legal license to do so, and you can only get divorced if a judge says you're divorced, right? Like it or not, you're ending up within that legal system that isn't designed to do what you want or need it to do. But that being true, is there something in the no-fight divorce system that encourages people, that says to them, "Here's what your legal rights are," or "Here's how you can talk to a lawyer," or "You should talk to a lawyer first, and then make whatever agreements you want"? You and I both know it's the idea of informed consent. If you're giving away rights you don't even know you have, that's a bad idea.
Rock: Well, that's why I think NoFightDivorce.com is good today, and it's going to get even better, because we are going to educate these people if they want to take the time to watch a 2-minute video, if they want to take the time to watch Max say, "Hey, you just agreed to sole legal custody, do you know what that means?" I at least think what we're building is better.
In Nevada, for example, in Clark County, we have about 2,500 divorces started every month, we have about 2,500 custody cases every month, and we have about 600 no-fight divorces, or uncontested, started every month. How many of those 600 are absolutely uninformed consent? 98% of them. They're going there, and whether some maybe are using LegalZoom that doesn't do what we do right now, most of them are doing the court forms. They're just filling them. Court forms don't tell you.
Our court form is so ridiculous. Our court form actually gives you the option: no community property, or it's already been divided or listed. I look at that, and I've talked to our court administrator, I go, there is never a choice of no community property. They're married. There is community property. Why would you give them that choice? You could say, "Hey, we've already divided it," or "Here's what we're going to do," but why would you say there's no community property?
Karen: Because they had a prenup?
Rock: Guess you could, but these people are uninformed. So, what we're hoping—I'll be honest with you, I'm hoping that our local courts pick up on what NoFightDivorce.com is doing. I hope they kind of see and go, "Oh, wait a minute, if we educate these people on what is a good custody schedule, how does the custody schedule affect child support? Play around with the child support calculator, or alimony." Alimony is just real tough. In Nevada, we don't have a formula!
Karen: Most states don't.
Rock: You've got 26 judges, you basically got 26 formulas, 26 approaches. I do think, like you said, there's 4 or 5 things that probably a no-fight divorce isn't going to do without at least having attorney representation on both sides. But at least it's better than what it is. That's what I'm excited about right now.
Karen: And I agree with you, and I think there's definitely a place for this, it makes so much sense. However, for the people that don't want to fight, but they can't agree, or they can't talk, is there a provision or route that they start with a no-fight divorce and get routed through mediation, which also keeps them from fighting in court if they make an agreement, or some other alternative dispute resolution system that resolves the issue?
Rock: Right now, what we have—and these are plans—let's say the husband puts in what he wants the no-fight divorce to be, invites the wife, she looks at it, she makes some changes, he doesn't like it, so you don't have an agreement, right? So we know that that's not it. What then is, he came through the system first, and Wright Lawyers is the attorney on the system, so we're looking at it as that we have to represent our loyalties to him first. So we offer him a free call with one of our attorneys to talk about it. What we want to do in the future is we want to offer her a list of recommended attorneys to do the same.
I've got to build that network, and look, you know it's kind of hard to talk to attorneys like this. When I go to attorneys and talk about no-fight divorces, it's just not something on their radar. They're more comfortable—here's how I look at it: we're more comfortable to fight as attorneys. We've been trained to do it. It's probably in our personality if we are still doing it after law school. It's easier for us to just look at the rules and say, "These are the rules, let me just go and put it in front of a judge and let the judge make a decision." In some ways, war is easier than diplomacy. I understand the rules of war.
So, attorneys are kind of built to start that war. We're kind of built to fight. We start the complaints, we put the inflammatory words in the complaint, we're the ones that sign off on knocking on your husband's door and serving him with a stranger. That needs to change a little bit, but it's got to happen over time. These attorneys have got to see, "Well, what's in it for me? Why would I do it like this?" So I'm hoping over time that No-Fight Divorce can grab other attorneys that say, "Yes, we like this too." So if you have a couple that comes there, and they can't come to an agreement, and the husband paid you the fee and signed up, he gets an appointment with you, and we'll give the spouse an appointment with another attorney, and then hopefully we can go from there.
Karen: Okay, I agree with what you said, but I know a lot of people, especially the litigants, would not, because what I hear from where I sit as a coach a lot of the time is, "Oh yeah, those lawyers, they're in cahoots," or "Their lawyer is in cahoots with the judge," and everybody thinks that the lawyers and the judge and the court system—everybody's plotting and planning behind their back. I hate to tell people, we're not that organized. That is not the way it works, okay?
Rock: It's so true! We don't have enough time to do that.
Karen: But what people don't realize is that they're in and out of the system one time, hopefully. We're in the system every single day, and so we have relationships with the other lawyers and the judge, and sometimes those relationships are good, sometimes they're not good. But the worst thing that I have ever seen is when two lawyers hate each other, and they're on opposite sides of the case, because now their clients are paying for the lawyers to settle their own fight. So, it makes more sense to have lawyers who get along than lawyers who don't.
Rock: You're right. People look at the attorneys that get along, and they don't like it. Well, one of the solutions that I think can happen, and I think it's going to come because of AI—so, you branched into this thing, the two attorneys fighting. I switched to flat fees about 11 years ago because of that very same thing.
I had an attorney in my office work for me that was having basically a fight with another attorney about a Rule 11. For everybody who doesn't know that, you did some sort of settlement negotiations, and then you disclosed it in a document, and someone claimed the Rule 11 argument. My attorney's right, the other attorney shouldn't have put that in there, shouldn't have done that, but he billed our client for that fight. She saw it on her bill; it was about $11,000.
She came to me as the managing attorney—actually, I was the office manager then, I wasn't an attorney—and I came to him, and I said, "Hey, we can't do this, why are we doing this?" "Oh, she did this, she did that," and I said, "I understand that, and I think you do have to make a point of that, but why is our client paying for that fight? My client has a good question: what does this do for her?" Nothing!
So, I started researching, and there's an attorney in North Carolina named Lee Rosen. I don't know if you've ever had him on your show.
Karen: No, I haven't, but I know Lee Rosen very well.
Rock: Yeah, so I went to a little get-together he had, and I learned about his whole flat fee model. So we do everything as a flat fee. The inspiration was because of a fight in my office. We changed to a flat fee because now my attorneys don't have the incentive to churn the fight. They have a flat fee for a specific task, and if they do it right, that's what they get. It works so much better, and it's actually more profitable—that's the other thing, I think hourly attorneys don't understand how profitable flat fees can be if you do it right.
Karen: Well, let me talk about that. Lee Rosen has been on the cutting edge for a lot of years, I've been following him, and I'm not as familiar with his flat fee model, but what is yours? Because I've seen different lawyers do this different ways: either it's one flat fee, like $1,500 for an uncontested divorce all in, or some people will say, you pay me a flat fee per month, and for that flat fee, I'll go to court as many times as you want, I'll do whatever you need, but it's a flat fee per month, not an hourly bill. How does your flat fee work?
Rock: Alright, so what I know is there's 3 out there that I've seen, maybe even a 4th. Lee Rosen is a flat fee—I mean, he's retired, but his firm still works like this—a flat fee from A to Z. I wish I had the balls to do that, but you hire him, it's $50,000, even if you settle at 3 months. It's a huge flat fee, he's not screwing around. Okay, that's one model, but I couldn't do that.
The other one that I've seen out there is the subscription service, like you're talking about. I looked at that one, but what I've done is I have created a flat fee based on task. Maybe it's a Nevada system, but our cases kind of break up into four segments. I do a flat fee for uncontested or no-fight, but let's say for contested: there's the initial stage where you have your first court hearing, then there's a little bit of discovery, then there's a settlement conference, and then there's trial. So what we do is we just list out the tasks, and then we have an estimate of how many hours that task on average takes.
We just have a library now. AI does it for me, by the way. It knows my numbers. It knows, "Okay Rock, you take this long to typically file a complaint, financial disclosure form, negotiate, and go to the case management conference." It knows my hours, or our firm's hours. So I do mine like that.
The other flat fee for a lot of people is that unbundled model, where it's just like, you're hiring me just to go into the court hearing. We don't do that. You're hiring me, I'm going to look at what tasks I can do. It's always going to include negotiation, by the way. Always. Every flat fee that my firm puts out comes with the mindset: we're going to do this, this, and this, but we're also going to try and settle your case. So, every one of our fees has a negotiation task.
Karen: So, with the flat fees, you've got those four sections of the case. Do you charge people per section, or do you say, "Okay, for all four of these sections, it's going to take X amount of time, we're going to charge you this flat fee"?
Rock: Per section. Per section. I can't project out, because what if the court changes things, or what if I settle at the settlement conference? Why would I charge you for a trial segment?
Karen: Okay, well, let's say people get through the first segment, or the first two, and they're out of money. They can't pay you for phase number 3 or 4. Now what?
Rock: We probably have to withdraw, which is always a sad discussion. You try to never retain a client that isn't going to be able to afford the whole situation, but that's almost impossible to do. Some people you think don't have money, and they do, and other people you think have money, and they don't.
What we do a lot with that—and this is why I think the flat fee is good, too—is I'm notifying the client when I'm negotiating. Let's say we're in the initial stage, and you paid me $4,400 to start your divorce, and we're coming to your first court hearing, and they want to give me an offer for you. We talk about the offer, and you say, "I don't think I want that." I am very big in explaining to you, "Okay, I think this offer's close, but if you don't take this offer, this is my next flat fee that's coming. Do you want to think about that?"
I probably cost myself money, but I'm okay with it. I will explain to people, for example, don't pay me $20,000 to go to trial when your spouse just wants $20,000 in alimony. Why are you doing this? Granted, I could use the money to pay for kids' colleges, or my pool, but I'm an advocate for you. I have to think about you. Divorce attorneys—we're financial planners, we're coaches, we're therapists. So, I'm a very big believer, and my attorneys know this and do the same thing, going, "Wait a minute, you're going to pay me a $20,000 flat fee to go to trial because of $10,000 in child support? Why would you do this?"
I've had people say, "Rock, I don't want to give her a dime, I'll give it to you." Okay, but I want you to know that I think you should give her the $10,000 instead of giving me the $20,000. Not just the money, but the aggravation, taking your day out of work, finding a parking spot at court, dealing with depositions. What are we doing? But I understand some people are in the fight, and it's a closure thing for them, and they've got to know. But that's how I typically handle that about the fees.
Karen: So, let's rewind a little bit, because I have another question about the agreements or the proposals going back and forth that people make. Let's say they do make an agreement. Is it binding?
Rock: I would think under the laws, if they've signed it...
Karen: Or do they go to court?
Rock: Yeah, no-fight divorces... Look, you're in Illinois, right? Is that where you practiced?
Karen: Yes.
Rock: Do you guys have joint petition forms, legal aid forms?
Karen: Oh, yeah, sure we do. But the thing is, people can sign a settlement agreement, but until they go to court and the judge signs off, it's not binding. Now, that's not true in every state.
Rock: We're kind of quasi, so here's how it would work in our system: they agree to the marital settlement agreement. Is that binding in Nevada? It's pretty good, but you can get around it. You always have those 6 months where you can set aside agreements anyway, right?
Karen: It's less than that, but yeah.
Rock: It's sort of binding, but the system will also kick out the legal documents that that marital settlement agreement gets attached to. If you click "File," it files it with the court. The court reviews it, and the court signs off on it. So it works just like the court legal aid forms—once you've come to an agreement, you get to review it, you get a digital signature, you look at what we call a joint petition pleading, you say "Yes, I agree to this," and then you file it, just like self-help forms.
Karen: So, people can file this directly from your system. They don't have to go to the clerk of the court or the court system websites to file and go through the procedures, and they don't have to show up in court, none of that.
Rock: No, with no-fight divorces, uncontested divorces, no one shows up to court anyway. With our system, yeah, they don't even have to go to court to file it. The system will file it, submit the final decree to the court judge department, and when the judge signs off on it, the system will email both of them a final divorce decree.
Karen: Okay. So let's say people are fighting, but they get through Phase 1, and they listen to you and say, "You know what, this doesn't make sense." So at the end of Phase 1, they reach an agreement. Is part of your flat fee writing up the documents and putting them through the system, too?
Rock: Absolutely. Always. Every one of our flat fee agreements in the contested system, as well as the uncontested, has negotiations, and everyone has the implied term that if we come to an agreement, we're drafting that stipulated agreement and filing it with the court. Every single one of them.
Karen: Between the time they agree to something and the time that it's filed, do they ever have the opportunity to download it or print it out and take it to an attorney and ask them to look at it?
Rock: Absolutely. In NoFightDivorce.com, yes.
NoFightDivorce.com is becoming our main brand for no-fight divorces or uncontested cases. Wright Lawyers is really a contested divorce firm—its magic is that it's a flat fee. Wright Lawyers used to do no-fight divorces, uncontesteds, and contesteds all in one, but No-Fight is a brand that's coming out to live on its own, and Wright Lawyers is going to be the contested side. If anybody doesn't get along in No-Fight Divorce, they're coming to Wright Lawyers, and Wright Lawyers is going to handle it as a contested case. The difference being, we still do every contested case on a flat fee process, and we do every stage of that flat fee with the mindset of, "Why are we fighting? What can we negotiate here?" We're trying to take away some of that anguish that these people go through, and we really do have these kind of conversations with these clients.
Some people don't like it. The only bar complaint I ever got was because I didn't take a client to trial. He wanted to pay me like $16,000 to go to trial, and there was no reason to go to trial except he wanted the judge to know that his wife cheated on him. I told him, "This is not going to work, two words are going to come out of my mouth." This is a little bit where I think the court system is broken—it's fight, fight, fight, but then the second you go into court and try to fight by saying she cheated or he's verbally abusive, the court goes, "Wait a minute, this is a no-fault family court, what are we doing here? Cool your jets."
So he wanted to pay me $16,000 to go to trial to do this, and attorney ethics—I just looked at it and said, "I can't take your money." We're going to open up our mouth, and the judge is going to say, "Mr. Rocheleau, what are you doing? Stop. This is a no-fault state." Then the client is going to look at me and go, "Why did you take my $16,000?" So I withdrew. That's my only bar complaint I ever got.
Karen: He still filed a complaint after you withdrew?
Rock: Wow, yeah. He said I wouldn't advocate for him and that I affected his case.
Karen: Interesting.
Rock: Wright Lawyers and No-Fight Divorce is not going to solve all the anguish in this $13 billion industry, but if we can do a little bit here... We have plans to take No-Fight Divorce and Wright Lawyers to Texas and see if it can grow a little bit there. Lee Rosen affected a lot of people, he has a following. I'm not claiming I want to try and be like Lee Rosen, but if I could take what he's taught me and make it a little bit better, maybe other people can jump on and see that this does work. We can grow our business.
For any attorneys listening to this: Wright Lawyers has done nothing but grow once we started doing flat fees and having a no-fight divorce mindset. People were going, "Why? Because you're leaving money on the table." You're right, but I'm getting so much goodwill in the community because people go, "Oh, you know what, you need to call Wright Lawyers, they'll help you out." They've heard from other people that we're not selling people out for an hourly fee, we're not taking their money when we shouldn't take their money, and we're constantly trying to negotiate and not stir the pot.
It has only made Wright Lawyers grow. It started with Stacy, my wife, in a closet in 2004, to now where we've got 5 attorneys and 4 paralegals. We're doing really well, and I really think it's because of the mindset of flat fees: do right by the client, try not to make this a fight, and negotiate when you can.
Karen: I agree with the mindset, but there are still—I would probably venture to say the majority of divorce lawyers don't have a similar mindset, and there's a certain percentage who are going to fight to the death and file motion after motion after pleading. You can literally be in court every second day if you've got the wrong attorney on the other side of the case. When you've got a case like that, and you're on a flat fee, and the other lawyer is churning to beat the band because they want to fight for their client or they're just very litigious and getting paid by the hour, how do you compete with that? Do you continue to represent that client, and how do you do it without going bankrupt?
Rock: We just lose money, but it's rare. Look, the other side has to keep anteing up, right? They've got to keep anteing up, and so they're going to keep filing motion after motion, so maybe that motion wasn't in that first fee agreement, and now I have to do a flat fee agreement for that motion. But eventually, people are going to look at paying this money to these attorneys.
I know it's a rare case because I'm not bankrupt, and there are attorneys out there like that. They're tough to deal with, they're hard. Sometimes our clients do have to drop out because of the flat fees, but they're just going to hire hourly attorneys, so they were going to have to drop out anyway.
Nevada does have an interesting system—we have something called subject-to-court-order fees. If one side is making all the money and using all the money, you have to give the other side the same availability to that money. You can't have two people come into court on unequal financial footing.
Karen: Yeah, level the playing field, we have that.
Rock: So that stops it a little bit. I think we could be stronger on awarding attorney's fees for unreasonableness. Nevada could be a little tougher on that to stop this stuff. But it doesn't happen as much as you would think. In those kinds of cases, that kind of attorney drives me batty. Those are the attorneys that really are giving the industry a bad name. I don't like those guys, I don't hang out with those guys. We have ours in Las Vegas, and I'm sure you have yours where you are. I'm sure every city has some attorneys where this is what they do—they love this fight, and the judges hate them for it, but it doesn't hurt my business as much as you would think. They're not as prevalent.
Karen: Interesting. So it sounds like you have some plans to start expanding No-Fight Divorce into other states moving forward.
Rock: Yeah, it's working well enough.
Karen: I was just going to ask, what would you tell someone right now who's unfortunately not in Nevada? What are their options? What can they look for to try to find a way to do something similar where they're at?
Rock: I would Google or ask ChatGPT for an uncontested divorce lawyer. They're probably not going to use the words "no fight," but amicable or uncontested. I would think most cities are using the word uncontested. Find and Google uncontested divorce lawyer and see who in your area has taken the time to put that on their website, because if they've taken the time to put that on their website, they probably at least have somewhat of that mindset.
I think you could ask for mediators, too. My challenge with mediators that are not attorneys—and this sounds protective of the industry—is if they don't know the law, then they're really just trying to help you guys based on what feels good, and they can't give you true legal advice, not legally anyway. So I would just type in "uncontested divorce lawyer Dallas, Texas" and see who pops up and call them.
Our next step is Reno, because Vegas we know is working, so we're going to stay within the state law, but then after that, Texas. Texas and Nevada have very similar summary dissolution of divorce laws, so that's why we're going to go to Texas. But we'll see. Might be in your state before you know it.
Karen: Interesting. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I think what I appreciate about it the most is that you're trying to do something different. You're trying to make a change to a system that clearly has got a lot of room for change. So, will your approach work across the country? I don't know, but at least you're trying to do something, and I appreciate that.
Rock: Thank you very much. I know you're the same.
Karen: Yes.
Rock: Reading about you and all that, you're the same, so that's what I like.
Karen: Yeah, I do it a little differently. I'm not going to take on the whole system, but I think with all the technology tools that we have, now might be the time. Rock, I appreciate the conversation. Thank you so much for being here. If people are interested in learning more, whether they're a professional or somebody facing divorce who wants to know more about you or No-Fight Divorce, where's the best place for them to find you?
Rock: RightLawyers.com is where they're going to find a lot about me, and NoFightDivorce.com is where they're going to meet Max in the system for no-fight divorces.
Karen: Rock, thanks again for being here, and I've really enjoyed today's conversation. For all of you out there who are watching or listening, if you've enjoyed today's conversation and you'd like to hear more conversations just like this, do me a big favor: give the episode a thumbs up, like the podcast, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and I look forward to talking with you again next time.
