Nobody teaches you how to get divorced.
You learn how to drive, how to interview for a job, maybe even how to do your taxes. Then one day you're sitting across from someone using words like "interim spousal support" and "community property partition," and you realize you're expected to make some of the biggest decisions of your life in a language you've never spoken.
We've watched this happen for years. Richard spent his career as a family law attorney and served as a judge, watching people walk into courtrooms confused, scared, and often alone. Reagan practiced law and built businesses, and heard the same story again and again from friends, clients, and strangers: I didn't know where to start.
That's the problem we set out to fix when we
founded DivorcePlus.
The gap we kept seeing
Divorce isn't rare, but it's still isolating. Psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe ranked it the
second most stressful life event a person can experience, behind only the death of a spouse. Think about what that means. The scale puts divorce above a jail term, above a serious illness, above losing your job. And unlike most of the events on that list, divorce doesn't happen to you in a single moment. It stretches across months or years, and it demands paperwork, negotiation, and clear thinking at exactly the time you're least equipped to provide them.
Most people face all of that with far less help than you'd expect. In recent data,
72% of family law cases involved at least one self-represented party, and researchers at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System found that in some courts,
80 to 90 percent of family cases involve someone without a lawyer.
The reason usually isn't stubbornness. It's money. In a national Nolo survey, people who hired a lawyer to handle their divorce from start to finish paid an
average of $11,300 in attorneys' fees, with a median of $7,000. That's per spouse. For a lot of families, especially families already absorbing the shock of splitting one household into two, that number simply isn't on the table. So they go it alone, hoping the internet and the court clerk will get them through.
A view from the bench, and from the other side of it
Richard saw where that leads. From the bench, he watched people scared and confused by the system. He watched parents come to court ready to fight about the wrong things because nobody had ever explained which things actually mattered to a judge. None of these people were unintelligent. They just didn't speak the language, and hiring a full-time translator at several hundred dollars an hour wasn't an option.
What stayed with him wasn't the legal errors. It was the fear. People would stand in a courtroom deciding the future of their children and their finances, and their overriding emotion was confusion about what was even happening. A judge can be fair, but a judge can't be your guide. The system assumes you arrived prepared.
Reagan came at the same problem from a different direction. As an attorney and someone who went through her own divorce, she saw first hand how to feels to process this life change.
We both saw people going through divorces quietly, expensively, and mostly alone. The friend who spent $400 on a consultation to ask a because they just needed someone to talk to without judgment. The parent who had no one to practice a hard conversation with before a custody exchange. The spouse who didn't need a lawyer or a therapist that particular week, but desperately needed somebody, and had no idea that a category of professional existed between the two.
Meanwhile the internet, which should have helped, made things worse. Search "how does custody work" and you'll get a thousand articles, half written for other states, a quarter written by content farms, and almost none written by someone who has stood in a courtroom or coached a parent through a first week of shared custody. When you're already overwhelmed, more information isn't the answer. Better information is.
What we built instead
DivorcePlus is our answer to that mess: one place where the information is written by people who know what they're talking about, and where the help is human.
Start with the articles. Everything in
Divorce 101 is written by working professionals in their fields. Attorneys and mediators write the legal pieces. Licensed psychologists write about the emotional side. Certified divorce and parenting coaches write about the day-to-day reality of rebuilding a life. When you read about mediation on our site, you're reading a practicing mediator. When you read about children and grief, you're reading someone who works with grieving families. We built it that way on purpose, because during a divorce you don't have time to fact-check the internet.
Then there are the
coaches. This is the part we're proudest of, and honestly the part most people don't know exists until they need it.
What a divorce coach actually does
A divorce coach aren't lawyers or therapists. A coach is the person who helps you with everything in between, which turns out to be most of divorce.
That looks different for different people. For some, it's getting organized: gathering documents, understanding the sequence of what happens next, and walking into an attorney consultation with a clear list of questions so the billable hour actually counts. For others, it's preparation, like rehearsing how to tell the kids, or how to stay composed in a mediation session when your spouse knows exactly which buttons to push. And for many, it's the bigger picture: figuring out what you actually want your life to look like in two years, so every decision along the way serves that goal instead of the argument you had last Tuesday.
Parent coaches do the same work for the co-parenting side, from building a workable custody schedule to handling the friction that comes after the papers are signed, because for parents, divorce doesn't end at the judgment. It just changes shape.
Reagan likes to describe the platform as urgent care for divorce. When something comes up, and in divorce something always comes up at nine o'clock on a Sunday night, you can find the right coach and schedule time with them, without waiting weeks for an appointment or wondering whether your question is "worth" a legal fee. That on-demand piece was central to the design from day one. Divorce doesn't keep business hours, so we decided our platform wouldn't either.
For the practical side, our
DIY divorce resources offer state-by-state guidance and forms. Handling what you can on your own keeps costs down and saves the professional fees for the moments that genuinely need a professional.
Why it matters to us
We're both from Louisiana. Richard grew up in a family shaped by the law and built his practice in New Orleans after law school at Loyola. Reagan grew up in Covington and has spent her career here in law and business. Between us, we've seen divorce from nearly every angle: as lawyers, as a judge, as entrepreneurs, as people whose friends and families went through the divorce system, and as a mom.
What we kept coming back to is this: divorce is hard enough. The confusion on top of it is optional. Nobody should feel lost in their own life because the system speaks a language they were never taught, and nobody should have to choose between paying five figures for guidance and getting none at all.
We're still building. We want more coaches in more specialties, more articles answering the questions people are afraid to ask out loud, and more ways to meet people wherever they are in the process. But the purpose won't change.
So that's what DivorcePlus is for. Read the articles. Ask the questions. Talk to a coach when you're ready. You don't have to become fluent in divorce overnight. You just need a translator, and now you have one.
Related Reading
If you're weighing whether you and your spouse can settle things outside a courtroom, attorney and mediator Macy Ledet explains how the process works in
Divorce Mediation: What a Louisiana Attorney Wants You to Know Before You Sit Down. For the emotional side of the process, certified divorce coach Ellen Pataro shares research-backed techniques in
A Coach's Guide for Coping Strategies During Divorce. If custody questions are on your mind, Richard and attorney Kate Amato break down when a child's preference matters to the court in
What If Your Son Wants to Live with His Dad? And if you're still deciding whether divorce is the right step at all, psychologist Alicia Pellegrin's
Relationship Burnout: When You're Not Angry, You're Just Empty is a good place to start.
