The law can often be seen as an effort to put order to the messy facts of human life. Most good lawyers understand that there is a long distance between one’s official legal “rights” and what they are actually going to get, and the Taiwan legal system often is not good at addressing the issues of past wrongs. Thus, people who want to use the law to fix up something that went bad in the past should keep in mind that most judges here do not embrace an American-style system of “pre-trial discovery” regarding facts and documents and that the system here does not embrace any real punishments against parties who make false testimony or provide false documents in a case. Take all that as a bit of background for the other immutable fact at play here – divorce is one of the messiest areas of law. Divorce is also the area of law most likely to involve intense personal feelings and, thus, a lack of rationality that tends to massive increase the legal costs.
When I was in law school, an adjunct professor talking about divorce said: “Clients will come to you and talk about ‘winning’ at divorce. They want to ‘win’. They’re not going to. They’re already losers, not in the sense that they’re deficient people, but divorce is a matter of trying to make the best out of a bad situation. They have lost a marriage that started out of better hopes and dreams.”
And so there are real limits to what a lawyer can do in a situation whereby a couple does not want to get divorced – Taiwan has some fairly tight restrictions that actually mirror the sort that many of the American states had right up until there was a movement towards no-fault divorce in the 1970s. And thus if a person here wants to get a divorce from a spouse who is angry, crazy, emotional or whatever, they are going to basically have to find a way to buy their way out of it at exorbitant cost. Or sometimes they simply cannot. What money would be necessary to solve the heartbreak, anger and insecurities of a failed marriage? One might as well ask how much a person would be willing to accept to have their arm removed at the elbow – there’s no good number.
That said, lawyers have a lot of things they can do when children are involved – if there are children involved and the client is willing to listen a bit there are a lot of things that can be done to resolve even awful custody or visitation situations. Some of the worst situations I’ve seen have involved extra factors where foreigner fathers have torpedoed their chances for success:
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Clients who don’t cooperate with their counsel on factual information or who show up to hearings in a manner that appears disrespectful are going to have serious problems. Dads who show up to hearings inebriated, hungover, dressed inappropriately, etc. are a problem, as are the ones who can’t control their emotions (and, admittedly, custody hearings and divorces are full of emotions) so as to yell at court personnel or judges. Dads who fail to disclose embarrassing information until it’s too late.
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Clients who do illegal stuff and get caught out at it by their spouse. There’s nothing to complicate a visitation/custody matter like having an arrest warrant out for some stupid thing that was done.
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Clients who don’t address the dumb illegal stuff they did. So you socked your wife’s new boyfriend in the nose? Hiding in Hong Kong or Singapore and avoiding Taiwan is not going to help you see your kids faster. Man up and go defend yourself or suck up your pride and settle with the bastard.
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Adding insult to injury – people in the midst of a divorce often dump gasoline onto existing fires. Gratuitous angry or mean crap against one’s ex, well none of this helps with the judges here.
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Not all lawyers are created equal, and not all specialize in this area of law. I’ve got a colleague who practices regularly in this field who has a master’s in family law from the UK and cares about the issues intently with good results. Feiren has mentioned another whom he recommends highly. But grabbing a random lawyer out of the telephone book is not going to get you much – and the local practitioners generally don’t turn anything away even if they don’t have the foggiest clue. Telecoms law? Sure! Bankruptcy? No problem! Complex multinational divorce? Absolutely! Given how hard the local bar exam is to pass and the relatively low flat-fee costs of obtaining legal representation, there’s apparently a prevailing belief among local lawyers that there’s nothing that they can’t do.
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Clients who don’t pay tend not to get very good results from local lawyers … or from any lawyers for that matter. Some of these cases require extraordinary efforts to overcome the foreigner versus local dynamic and to cover the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sorts of arguments that will be put out by an angry local parent and her counsel. Add in that some of these situations will involve legislators, media attention, etc. that just hypes things up. There was a rather famous case a few years ago where the dad did not pay any of his legal bills and every law firm in town knew about it. When he tried to shop his case around to the potential second group of suckers whom he wouldn’t pay, he kept faxing 200-page piles of documents to my office and demanding my instant feedback while disregarding the retainer note we’d sent weeks earlier. I didn’t take on that case, the dad lost, and he proclaimed the Taiwan courts to be corrupt.
This is just a bit of a stream of consciousness flow here. Lawyers have a time and place, but there are limitations as to what the laws here will allow. Several of the situations described by Northcoast Surfer involve attempts by foreigners to hire local counsel despite in a quixotic attempt to change local law despite clear code provisions to the contrary – bound to be a huge waste of money. My general experience has been that the courts here have been willing to try to reach a competent result. But if a foreigner plays into every negative stereotype, gets crappy and/or ambivalent local counsel, etc., they will lose.