I needed to find a different lawyer. Wanda (with Jeffry sometimes coming in as additional firepower) just didn’t feel right to me. I had gone to Jeffry initially at the recommendation of a friend who had been represented by him. He was one of Boston’s “Lawyers to the Stars,” well known as the best pit bull divorce lawyer in town. All of the other divorce lawyers in town hated him. He gave me great advice in our meeting when Scott and I separated, telling me to get control of the family finances, shut down the home equity credit line and make sure to get an STD test. He then passed me to Wanda saying she would be the best suited to work with me if Scott and I divorced, with his oversight when needed. It was clear my case wasn’t at his pay grade.

Without a doubt, Wanda was extremely competent. But I didn’t feel she could fight hard enough for me. At $750 per hour, Jeffry was just too expensive. More importantly, he was condescending. His attitude made his thinking clear: here comes another idiot suburban housewife who couldn’t protect herself from a cheating louse of a husband. I didn’t want to work with someone who didn’t respect me.

But the thought of having to go out and find a different lawyer was daunting. Scott’s Chinese water torture infidelity disclosures had really done a number on my self confidence. I was unsure about my intuition and feel for people. If I was wrong in trusting him all these years, what did that say about my ability to judge people? I was also indecisive, which wasn’t typical of me. I was insecure and distrustful of almost everyone around me. How do you go about finding a good divorce lawyer when you can barely talk about your situation to your friends and family?

At the same time, I knew I couldn’t outsource my decision on a lawyer to someone else. I had to start standing up for myself and doing this alone was an important step. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with on-line research as my starting point. Certainly no referrals or reviews of Boston divorce lawyers to provide good guidance. I did learn one should interview a number of lawyers and the first appointment would be free of charge.

I sought the advice of a number women who had recently gone through divorces and asked for their recommendations. It was hard enough to find divorced women who would speak with me. Once I found them, the referrals were a mixed bag. One said her lawyer was so bad she wouldn’t even give me his name. I also asked my therapist and psychiatrist for recommendations. My brother, cousin and a friend, all lawyers (though none practiced family law), offered some guidance. They couldn’t offer any names though as they weren’t from Boston.

With the exception of my therapist and psychiatrist, these were all extremely difficult conversations. However, I learned something from each of them that helped as I made my decision. I was able to build a list of lawyers I could research and interview.

I interviewed two individual lawyers and one two-person team. I ultimately chose the team, a pair of new partners at a mid-sized firm in Boston. The two had been recommended to me by independent sources. Patrick had been suggested by an acquaintance who was divorced. She recommended both Patrick and her own divorce lawyer (who I also interviewed). She had been impressed with Patrick when she interviewed him, even though she didn’t hire him. Marianne was recommended by my psychiatrist who said she had successfully represented a local woman in a particularly nasty divorce.

I chose Patrick as the lead partner on my case – he had trial experience and his demeanor worked well with mine. Tall and drop dead handsome, he had a great presence about him. Marianne had been a DA in Boston, had tried quite a few sex crime cases and I got along well with her too. Both were in their early forties with plenty of family law experience. A few knowledgeable friends had advised it would be tough for me personally if I didn’t respect the intelligence of my attorneys. Patrick and Marianne seemed quite smart in our early meetings. They were respectful of me and my background. Most importantly, I just liked my vibe with them.

I reasoned they would be a good team – nice guy (Patrick), tough guy (Marianne) with the interesting twist that Marianne was the tough guy. Funny though – it turned out Patrick played the tough guy. Marianne often swooped in as the nice guy trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to negotiate a solution. They assured me having two lawyers wouldn’t mean having double the bill, and honored their promise. In fact, Scott’s legal bills, with his incompetent oaf of a lawyer, were significantly higher than mine in the end.

Marianne was known in their firm as the one who got the “difficult cases,” which I laughed about when I hired them, telling them “well I don’t think my case is one of those!” I really missed the boat on that one! As it turned out, Scott’s behavior, incessant lying and narcissistic personality made my case difficult, especially since I adamantly refused to back down. Coupled with that, Scott’s attorney was both an idiot and one of the most obnoxious people I had ever met. He was almost impossible to work with.

I hired Patrick and Marianne right after the New Year in 2013, about three months after Scott moved out of the house. The first thing they did was submit my formal divorce complaint with the court. This was an important step to protect me financially. Once a formal divorce petition is filed, it becomes very difficult for either spouse to hide or transfer assets or to unilaterally drain bank accounts.

Scott had already taken $35,000 from the joint bank account since first leaving the house in October. Now in mid January, he emailed me wanting an additional $35,000. But with a formal divorce petition filed, Scott could not legally withdraw money from the joint account without my permission. To get the money, Scott finally agreed he was taking it as an advance against his share of the marital estate. I then took a matching $35,000 advance for my own use to square us up.

My lawyers asked me to start collecting documentation on our financial situation. This required collecting recent statements from our investment accounts, our mortgage, any other loans we had outstanding and our various insurance policies. In addition, they wanted me to produce one year’s worth of bank statements. Luckily we kept the hard copy statements sent each month. I dug everything out and started organizing the statements.

I was pulling together the bank statements when I found it – a teller assisted withdrawal for $4,500 on September 18, 2012, three weeks before he moved out. There was another one on September 13 for $1,500. What the hell were these? He was walking into a bank and withdrawing thousands of dollars in cash?

The $4,500 had been withdrawn from a bank near the near the Massachusetts Turnpike, the freeway he used most weeks as he started his trip to New Jersey for work. I had never even been in this bank branch. He must have done it on his way down as I knew he had been in New Jersey that week. The $1,500 had been withdrawn in New York City, another of the places he frequented on his almost weekly business trips.

What was he doing with the cash? The image of dweeby Scott peeling $100 off of a big wad of bills like a two-bit wise guy was comical but it didn’t fit. In fact, he was usually short of cash, often asking me for a few twenties on his way out the door for his weekly business travel down to Connecticut, New York City or New Jersey. He would say he was so busy with work and business travel he just didn’t have time to get to the bank. Since I had never seen wads of cash in his wallet, he must have been stashing it somewhere.

Prompted by discovery of the teller assisted withdrawals, I started looking at the rest of the monthly bank statements for 2012. It was like peeling a stinky, rotten onion. A methodical investigation of each statement revealed he had made eighteen teller assisted withdrawals in 2012, taking a total of $37,000 in cash from our joint checking account. But as I was identifying the teller assisted withdrawals, I also notice an alarming number of ATM withdrawals, all in amounts too large to have been done by me and mostly at branches I had never visited. Even more, I saw he had done teller assisted and ATM withdrawals from our savings account and our home equity line of credit too. Finally, I found electronic payments to his two personal credit cards much higher than they should have been.

How long had he been siphoning money from our bank account? The only way to get an answer was to do an historical investigation of our bank statements, month by month, until I found the beginning of the withdrawal and credit payment pattern. The withdrawals and excessive credit payments went back four years. They had begun in December of 2008, a year and a half before I first found out about his mistress. All told, he had withdrawn nearly $250,000 in cash!

To say I was angry would be a blinding glimpse of the obvious. I was bullshit and I was going to get to the bottom of it! The tide was turning and if he thought he was going to steam roll me, he was sadly mistaken!