When you come into the office we’re going to give you a packet of information. One of the things in there is something called the case information statement. People look at it and they freeze sometimes, but it’s really pretty basic and our advice is to go through it section by section and we’re here to help you. It’s the document that’s really the keystone of the economic decisions in the case and a statement of five things.

Some biographical information, your income, your assets, your expenses and your debts. The difficult thing for many people is it’s the first time they’ve ever sat down and looked at their expenses because very few people living in society today have a budget. So you need to go through each item on the case information statement and if you don’t have the documents in front of you, if you don’t have the bills, you don’t have the credit cards, estimate, it’s always modifiable, it’s not etched in stone. But if it’s an estimate, let us know it’s an estimate. And once you do a draft, bring it in and we’ll go over it with you. We’ll -- we’ve done so many of them that we can give you some idea of, within a reasonable degree of -- of error, whether your expenses are in the ballpark with what’s expected.

Often we run into a problem where the expenses that our clients tell us about are something that are just so far beyond what a judge is going to think is reasonable that we have to try to take that document, and take the client’s numbers and provide very detailed explanations so that the judge understands where those numbers came from because judges are human and they look at these budgets and they compare it to their own budget. And we have to help the client sort of introduce his or her lifestyle to the judge in a way that the judge can understand and have some empathy with.