Multiple divorce lawyers reprimanded, suspended for sub-par performance
Divorce lawyers are not doing their jobs well. The Board of Deans, the supervisory body for lawyers, investigated nine divorce lawyers spread across the country and discovered that not a single one of them met the standards applicable to their profession, Trouw reports. They have all been reprimanded. Several were suspended.
In the Netherlands, it is common for divorcing couples to enlist the help of a mediator to draw up a settlement agreement regarding the division of assets and custody of children, among other things. “What many people do not know is that at the end of that process, a lawyer is always required to file the divorce with the court,” Eef van de Wiel, Dean of the Noord-Nederland region, told the newspaper.
Often, the mediator engages the divorce lawyer to file the case in court as part of the package they offer. The Board of Deans had a suspicion that the services provided by these lawyers may be substandard and launched an investigation. They chose the nine investigated lawyers based on their unusually high number of cases. Some of them filed up to 2,000 divorce cases annually. “That’s so many, there is little more you can do than put a staple through it. And that is exactly what happened,” Van de Wiel said.
To the Board of Dean’s astonishment, they had to reprimand every single one of the nine lawyers. One quit voluntarily. Several others were suspended or even dismissed by the disciplinary court.
Unlike mediator, lawyer is a protected title that falls under the disciplinary law. The eleven Deans in the Netherlands supervise the functioning of the profession. A lawyer is legally obliged to carefully review the settlement agreement drafted by the mediator and must protect their clients from agreements they might later regret.
According to Van de Wiel, the degree of negligence among the investigated lawyers varies, but not a single one of them met the applicable standards. At the very least, a lawyer must be certain that clients understand the consequences of the agreements, so they must make contact with the clients. “Some lawyers even neglected to do that,” Van de Wiel said.
“A divorce is one of the worst things that can happen to you in life. It is an unpleasant period, and you want to get it over with quickly. Your tendency is then to not want the hassle of lawyers. Precisely then, it is important to have people around you who are stable and protect you from ill-considered choices. A lawyer has that role. That is why we have arranged this by law.”
