By Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce · Updated
Correspondence with your own lawyer is one of the largest controllable costs in a divorce, and almost nobody explains how to do it well.
| Why this costs money | Reading and answering your email is billable time, charged in increments — commonly six or fifteen minutes, whichever your retainer specifies. A two-minute reply can cost a fifteen-minute unit. |
|---|---|
| The single highest-value habit | Batching. One email a week covering six points costs a fraction of six emails sent as they occur. |
| What belongs in writing | Facts, dates, decisions, instructions, anything you may need to prove later. |
| What belongs on a call | Anything ambiguous, anything emotionally loaded, anything where a misunderstanding would take four emails to unpick. |
| The rule for calls | Follow every call with two lines in writing recording what was decided. |
| One subject per email | Makes it findable in nine months. Makes it answerable in five minutes. |
| If you are in New York | You cannot be charged for time spent discussing your bills with your lawyer (22 NYCRR 1400.3). |
Keeping track of dates like these across a stack of letters is exactly what SortMyDivorce does — start a free trial, no card needed.
Almost all family law work is billed in increments. The two common ones are a tenth of an hour — six minutes — and a quarter of an hour, fifteen minutes. Each discrete task is rounded up to at least one increment.
That means a two-line email asking whether a date has been confirmed is not a two-minute task on your bill. On a quarter-hour increment it is fifteen minutes. Send five of those in a week and you have spent an hour and a quarter of your lawyer's time on questions that took you nine minutes to type.
None of this makes emailing your lawyer wrong. It makes scattering your emails expensive, which is a different problem with a much easier fix.
Write, rather than call, when the thing needs to exist afterwards.
Facts and documents. Anything with a number, a date, an address, a balance. Anything you are sending across. Anything your lawyer will need to quote accurately later.
Instructions. If you are telling your lawyer to do something — accept, reject, counter, file, stop — put it in writing. This protects both of you. A verbal instruction that is later remembered differently is a genuinely bad situation, and it is entirely avoidable.
Decisions you have made. Same reason. "I have decided to accept the parenting schedule as proposed" is a sentence that should exist in a file.
Anything you might need to prove. If the other side has done something that matters — missed a handover, failed to produce a document, made a threat — record it in writing, dated, factually, at the time. Contemporaneous records are worth far more than a recollection assembled six months later.
Anything time-sensitive. A deadline conveyed in a phone call is a deadline that exists in one person's memory.
Pick up the phone when the thing needs to be understood rather than recorded.
Anything genuinely ambiguous. If you have read a letter three times and still cannot tell whether it is an offer, a threat or a formality, a two-minute call will settle it and four emails will not.
Anything emotionally loaded. Written exchanges about difficult things escalate. They also get longer, and length is cost. If you are upset about something, a call is both cheaper and better.
Anything where you need to think out loud. Weighing an offer, working through what you could live with, testing a position — these are conversations. Trying to have them by email produces very long emails and very large bills.
Anything where you sense a misunderstanding. The moment you think you and your lawyer are talking past each other, stop writing. Every further email compounds it.
The corollary is not optional: after any call that decides something, send two lines recording what was decided. You get the clarity of a conversation and the record of correspondence, without paying to build the record through correspondence.
Six habits. All of them are free.
One subject per email. An email covering the pension, the school holidays and a missing bank statement will get answered on whichever point is easiest and the other two will need chasing. It is also unfindable later. If you have three unrelated things, either send three short emails on the same day or — better — one clearly numbered list.
Say what you want in the first line. Not the background. The ask. "I need a decision from you on whether to counter their 8 August offer." Then the background. A lawyer reading forty emails before lunch should know within one sentence what this one requires.
Number your questions. Numbered questions get numbered answers. Prose questions buried in paragraph four get missed, and a missed question becomes a follow-up email, which is another increment.
Put the deadline in, if there is one. "Their letter asks for a response by 22 August." Do not assume it is known. Do not assume the letter has been read yet.
Name your attachments properly. 2026-08-08-letter-from-opposing-counsel.pdf costs you three seconds and saves someone else three minutes. scan_0047.pdf does the reverse, and you are paying for the difference.
Keep the thread. Reply within the existing thread for an ongoing issue rather than starting a new one. Start a new thread only for a genuinely new subject, and give it a subject line you could search for.
Adapt these. The structure is the point, not the wording.
Subject: Weekly update and questions — [your name], week of 18 August Nothing urgent here. Four things, in order of priority. 1. Decision needed: their 8 August proposal on the property split. I am inclined to counter rather than accept. Can we speak this week? 2. New information: my hours are being cut from 1 October, income down roughly 15%. Payslip attached. 3. Question: the corporate financials we asked for on 20 June still have not arrived. What are the options? 4. FYI, no action needed: they cancelled the 16 August weekend. Second time in six weeks. Logging it in case it becomes a pattern. Attached: 2026-08-08-letter-from-opposing-counsel.pdf, 2026-08-15-payslip.pdf
Subject: Instruction — accept parenting schedule as proposed 12 July Confirming my instruction: please accept the parenting schedule set out in their letter of 12 July, unchanged. To be clear, this is the schedule only. I am not agreeing anything about property or support.
Subject: Confirming our call — 19 August Thanks for your time. My understanding: - We are countering on property, not accepting. - You are drafting the counter and sending it to me by Friday. - I am sending you the 2025 tax return by Wednesday. - We are leaving the missed weekends for now and revisiting if it happens again. Let me know if I have any of that wrong.
Chasing, without friction
Subject: Following up — corporate financials requested 20 June Checking in on this rather than chasing — I know these things take time. The corporate financials were requested on 20 June and chased on 14 July. Is there anything useful I can do at my end, or is it a case of waiting?
Subject: Question on invoice 1042 A couple of queries on the July invoice, no urgency. 1. The entry on 14 July for 2.4 hours covers several tasks. Could I have that broken out by task? 2. There are two entries for the same conference call on 22 July. Is that correct? Also, for future work: is document collation something [paralegal] could handle at the lower rate?
The 3am email. Write it. Do not send it. Almost nothing written at 3am improves a legal position, and it will be read, billed and filed. Save it as a draft and reread it at 9am — you will usually send a much shorter version.
The forwarded chain with no explanation. A twelve-message thread forwarded with "see below" costs someone twenty minutes to parse. Summarise in two lines and attach.
The running commentary. Not every message from your spouse needs forwarding in real time. Keep a log, send it periodically, flag anything genuinely significant immediately.
Anything you would not want read out. Assume everything you write could end up in front of a judge or in the hands of the other side in some circumstances. This is not a reason to be guarded with your own lawyer — you should be completely honest with them — but it is a reason to be factual rather than florid.
The reopened decision. If something was decided a week ago and you have had second thoughts, that is legitimate — but say that explicitly. "I want to revisit the decision we made on X, and here is why" is a fair email. Quietly proceeding as though the decision was never made is expensive and confusing.
A contested divorce generates a lot of correspondence. Twelve months in, most people cannot find the email where a particular thing was agreed, and the cost of that is not theoretical — it is the hour someone bills reconstructing it, and the weaker position you take because you cannot quote it.
Three habits prevent it, and none of them take longer than the alternative.
Use subject lines you could search for. "Update" and "Quick question" are unfindable. "Property split — counter to their 8 August proposal" is findable in three seconds. Write the subject line as though you will be searching for it later, because you will.
Keep one thread per issue, not per week. Parenting, property, support and disclosure are four different conversations that unfold over different timescales. Mixing them into a weekly thread means that in March you will be scrolling through school-holiday discussion to find a pension figure. The weekly batched update is for new items and questions; once something becomes a live negotiation with its own back-and-forth, give it its own thread.
Record decisions in a form that survives. An email thread is a record of a discussion, not of a conclusion. The conclusion needs to be stated somewhere plainly: what was decided, on what date, on what basis. Two lines at the end of a thread — "So: countering on property, accepting the schedule, revisiting the missed weekends if it recurs" — is worth more later than the forty messages above it.
The underlying point is that your file and your lawyer's file are different things. Theirs is organised for their work. Yours needs to be organised for your decisions — what is agreed, what is open, what has moved, and what is waiting on whom. Nobody builds that for you.
For most matters, one batched update a week is plenty, plus anything genuinely urgent as it happens. If you are emailing daily and it is not an emergency, the volume is likely costing you more than the answers are worth.
Generally yes — reading and responding is billable time, usually rounded up to your retainer's minimum increment. Ask what your increment is if you do not know. If you are in New York, note that time spent discussing your bills specifically cannot be charged to you.
Communications with your lawyer for the purpose of legal advice are generally protected, but the protection is not unlimited and it can be affected by who else is on the email. Do not copy in family members or new partners without asking first. Use an account your spouse cannot access, and be aware of shared devices and shared cloud accounts.
Give it a reasonable window — a few working days for anything non-urgent — then follow up in writing, referencing the original date. A written follow-up creates a record and is usually all it takes. If non-response becomes a pattern, that is a different problem.
Ask them first. Some lawyers want to see everything; others do not want to be billed-time recipients of routine exchanges. Agree a rule early and follow it.
Last reviewed August 2026. Researched and written by Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice — laws, fees and forms change, so please confirm current details with your court’s official website or a local family lawyer.
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