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Baxter Law She also represents business clients in administrative and regulatory matters.

Devon focuses her practice on divorce and complex asset division, helping clients navigate the financial and legal issues that arise when a marriage or relationship ends.

10/08/2026

If you are representing yourself, questioning a witness is where it usually falls apart. ⚖️

Not because the questions are hard. Because of how you are allowed to ask them.

You cannot lead your own witness. Most people do not know that until an objection lands mid-sentence and the judge is looking at them.

AI is genuinely useful here:

1. Tell it you are preparing to question a witness
2. Say explicitly that you need to avoid leading questions
3. Tell it which answers you are trying to draw out
4. Ask it to flag the objections opposing counsel is likely to raise

What comes back is a workable script, in the right form, with the traps marked.

Same rule as always though. Keep confidential case details out of it. Ask about technique, not about your case. 🔒

10/07/2026

I tell people to go talk to other divorce lawyers before they hire me. 🤝

Two or three of them, ideally.

I know how that sounds coming from the person hoping to be hired. But a divorce lawyer is someone you will be speaking with during the worst months of your life, and fit matters more than most people realise going in.

What I actually do in a consultation:

1. Give you the facts of your situation, plainly
2. Tell you what the realistic range of outcomes looks like
3. Say out loud that you do not have to decide today
4. Suggest you speak with a couple of other attorneys first

Absent a genuine emergency, nobody should be making this decision in a rush. Different lawyers will give you slightly different perspectives, and hearing two or three of them is how you figure out which approach actually fits you.

If somebody is pushing you to sign the same day, that itself is information. 🚩

10/06/2026

Some people do not file because they want a divorce. They file because they want a reaction. 📩

I can usually spot it within the first week.

The petition goes out, and instead of asking what happens next, they ask what he said. What she said. Whether anyone seemed surprised.

They were not ending the marriage. They were sending a message.

Usually it is one of these:

1. They want their spouse to finally pay attention
2. There was an affair, and they want to see remorse
3. They want someone else to confirm how serious things have gotten
4. They think the shock will make the other person change

Here is the hard part. Filing is not a conversation. It is a legal process with its own momentum, and it does not pause while someone decides whether they have made their point.

Those are the cases where I see genuine regret later.

If what you want is a response, there are cheaper ways to ask for one.

10/05/2026

Everyone online is telling you how not to use AI in your divorce. Here is one way that actually works. 🤖

Getting evidence admitted trips up almost every self-represented person.

You have the photo. You have the text message. You have the bank statement. You assume you can just hand it to the judge, and then you find out there is a procedure, and the procedure is the part nobody taught you.

So use AI for exactly that:

1. Open ChatGPT or Claude
2. Tell it the specific item you need admitted, a photograph, a text thread, a bank statement
3. Ask for a short script to introduce and authenticate it at a hearing
4. It will give you the questions to ask and the order to ask them in

One important line to stay behind. Do not put confidential case information into any of these tools.

You are asking it about procedure, not about your case. ⚠️

10/01/2026

There is a version of this that has no name, so nobody talks about it. 🏠

I call it the quiet divorce.

You are not separated. You have not filed anything. On paper you are a married couple living in a house together.

In practice it looks like this:

1. No intimacy, and it has been years rather than months
2. Separate friends and separate social lives
3. Separate bank accounts, separate everything financial
4. You cross paths in the kitchen around dinner and that is roughly the extent of it

Here is what makes it stick. The law has no category for this. There is no form for mostly finished. So it runs on indefinitely, sometimes for a decade, because nothing forces the question.

If you read that list and recognised your own house, you have already had the divorce.

You just have not filed the paperwork. 📄

09/30/2026

A lot of people stay married for an audience that is not paying the price.

Not for their spouse. Not for their kids. For what leaving would look like.

I hear it constantly, and it is rarely phrased directly. It comes out as worry about what people will think, or how it will reflect on them, or what it says about who they are.

Here is what I would offer:

1. A divorce is a lesson, not a verdict on your character
2. The people whose opinions you are dreading are not living in your house
3. Staying unhappy has a cost too, it is just quieter
4. Closing a chapter respectfully is its own kind of responsibility

Nobody hands out credit for years spent miserable in a marriage that ended anyway.

If you are going to leave eventually, leaving well beats leaving late. 🚪

09/29/2026

People always want to know about the big blowup. The fight that ended it. 🤫

In my experience it is almost never the fight.

It is the quiet afterward.

The pattern I see most often looks like this:

1. The same argument, repeated for years, going nowhere
2. One person quietly stops bringing it up
3. Things get calm in a way that feels like relief
4. Small behaviour changes nobody quite names
5. Divorce papers

The other person almost always describes it the same way. They thought things had finally gotten better.

What actually happened is that one of them stopped trying. Arguing takes investment. Silence can mean the decision already got made.

Not every quiet stretch means something. Plenty of marriages just get calmer. But if the peace arrived suddenly and nothing actually got resolved, that is worth paying attention to.

09/28/2026

I have had people walk into my office thinking they were comfortable, and the real number was negative two hundred thousand dollars. 💸

Not a rough patch. That was the actual marital value.

The cars were financed. The credit cards were stretched. Money was being moved around each month to keep the whole thing looking intact from the outside.

Their spouse knew. They did not.

Here is what people are usually running on:

1. He drives that car, so he must earn around this
2. They took that vacation, so they must be fine
3. We live in this house, so we must be doing well
4. Money has always been tight, so there cannot be much there

That last one goes wrong just as often, in the opposite direction. I have seen spouses quietly stockpiling savings while insisting a family vacation was out of reach.

People married ten years routinely cannot ballpark what their partner earns. Not the exact figure. The ballpark.

You are allowed to just ask. 👀

09/24/2026

Three ways to win over the judge in your divorce case. ⚖️

None of them involve being right.

1. Own your bad behaviour. The nasty text. The speeding ticket with your kid in the car. Tell your lawyer first and get ahead of it.

2. Look and act the part at every appearance, Zoom included. Private space, no one wandering through the background, dressed like you are in the room. Because you are.

3. Pick your battles. Judges have family law cases stacked all day. Be reasonable on the small things so you still have credibility for the big ones.

The first one is where most cases quietly go wrong. The damage is almost never the thing itself. The damage is the thing surfacing in cross-examination after you denied it.

You can survive looking human. Looking dishonest is much harder to come back from.

And do not roll your eyes while the other side is talking. Judges catch all of it, and it lands on you rather than your argument. 👀

09/23/2026

Child support is not charity. 💰

I have had people sit across from me and say they feel guilty asking. A few have told me they do not really believe in it.

I understand where that comes from. Asking can feel like taking something from someone you used to love, or admitting you cannot manage alone.

That framing gets the ownership wrong:

1. It is not your money, it is your child's
2. It is not a favor, it is a legal entitlement
3. It is not a judgment on you, it is a calculation
4. It is not optional for them, it is the law in Florida

You are not asking your ex for anything. You are collecting something your child is owed, and your job is to spend it on them.

Guilt is a poor reason to leave a kid with less than the law already says they get.

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