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J. Richard Kulerski
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J. Richard Kulerski
J. Richard Kulerski, PC
1200 Harger Rd.
Suite 320
Oak Brook, IL 60523-9035
Phone: (630) 928-0600 | Fax: (630) 928-0670
http://www.CivilizedDivorce.com
and Kari L. Cornelison, Cooperative Divorce Law
Legal Topic
Family Law
Preferred New Clients
Cases involving divorce mediation, collaborative divorce, or cooperative divorce law.
Sub-Categories
Family Law
- Mediation/Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)
- Name Changes
- Child Support
- Custody
- Paternity
- Visitation
- Marriage
- Prenuptial & Postnuptial Agreements
Legal Topic
Divorce
Preferred New Clients
Cases involving litigation, divorce mediation, collaborative divorce, or cooperative divorce law.
Sub-Categories
Divorce
- Alimony/Palimony/Spousal Support
- Annulment
- Child Support
- Custody/Visitation Rights
- Division of Property
- Mediation/Alternative Dispute Resolution(ADR)
- Uncontested Divorce
- Collaborative Law
Bar Admissions
IL, Nov 1963
Bar Number: 1546171
Specialty Certifications
Specialty certifications for attorneys are not allowed in Illinois.
Other Court Admissions
Illinois, Federal District Court - Northern District of Illinois, and Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D.C.
Association Memberships
See link to bio.
Continuing Education
I attend and teach at continuing legal education seminars on the topics of Family Law and Collaborative Divorce Law. I always exceed the required number of continuing education hours.
Papers and Publications
I contribute to:
Illinois Bar Association Journal
DuPage Bar Association
For a listing of my legal articles - click link.
"Why Can't We Just Settle the Divorce Ourselves?"
| Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six |
For a listing of my Examiner.com articles - click link.
"The Divorce Court Door"
"Your link to saving pain and expense during your divorce"
"Divorce me Tender"
"Cooperative Divorce: If you argue with your spouse and win, you have already lost"
"The secret to a friendly divorce"
"How to discuss a divorce settlement with your soon to be ex"
"The cooperative approach to divorce"
For the Kindle version of my book, The Secret to a Friendly Divorce - click link.
Example Cases
My professionalism, my duty of total confidentiality, and my respect for the privacy of all of my clients ? past and present ? prohibit me from citing any examples of my work. Suffice it to say that an attorney becomes privy to, or is part of, many remarkable things over the course of four decades in the trenches of divorce court.
Education
Degree:
Juris Doctor
School:
DePaul University School of Law
City:
Chicago
State:
IL
Year:
1963
Focus and Accomplishments:
See bio page for achievements and distinctions.
Number of Attorneys
4
State Licensed In
Illinois and Florida.
Firm Focus and History
We try to help reasonable people have reasonable divorces. We are staunch believers in the settlement approach to divorce, and we do everything we can to keep our clients' divorces peaceful, on time, and on budget.
Early settlement is our priority. Over 90% of all divorces settle out of court or prior to trial, so we try to get right to the settlement part of every divorce. We believe that our time and energy are better spent if we focus on achieving an out-of-court settlement for our clients than by routinely preparing for a trial that, statistically at least, is not going to take place.
A divorce trial should always be our client's last resort. However, this does not mean that we will allow him or her to be pushed around. We will always fight if we have to do so in order to protect our client's interests. Our firm's partners, Kari Cornelison and I, have some 60 years of combined divorce trial experience between us. Despite our enthusiasm for the cooperative approach to divorce, we are not strangers to the divorce trial courts in Chicago and in its surrounding counties.
I have been a practicing divorce lawyer in the Chicago metropolitan area since 1963. In the spring of 2009, attorney Kari L. Cornelison and I merged our practices and became full partners. We practice in Chicago (Cook County) and in Oak Brook (Du Page County), Illinois under our firm name of Kulerski & Cornelison.
Previous Employment Summary
I have been a self-employed, practicing divorce lawyer in Chicago and suburbs since 1963.
Activities and Awards
See bio link for memberships and distinctions both past and present.
What is your opinion regarding clients educating themselves on legal issues?
It depends on the client and on the information. Self education in divorce is laudable, but there are times when it can present a drawback to the client. This happens when it misleads the client as to how the law will apply in his or her particular case.
Information on divorce has become plentiful on the internet, and the bulk of what we find is generally very solid. However, it is still general information and, while it can be helpful, the reader must be aware that there are likely to be critical exceptions to whatever it is that they are reading.
Typical internet divorce info rarely tells the whole story. It can't. The whole story is usually comprised of factors that are beyond explanation in one short sitting.
The reader's odds of finding information that accurately matches his or her factual situation are extremely slim. The law is always the same, but the clients' sets of facts (that determine how the law should be applied) are rarely, if ever, the same.
For example, let's say the info in question stands for the principle that homemaker spouses of 20 year marriages are generally entitled to alimony. The reader runs the risk of believing that this simple principle, as stated, will govern the outcome of their case. However, and unknown to the reader, there may be similar cases with slightly different facts in which the same principle of law has been applied differently. A slight difference in the facts of a case can cause a major deviation in its outcome.
It takes an experienced attorney to know the right questions to ask in order to determine which aspect of the law will fit a client's particular set of facts.
Are you willing to review documents prepared by clients?
We routinely review clients' documents and we charge our customary hourly fee when doing so.
Are you willing to coach clients who want to represent themselves?
The spirit is willing, but the job is deceptively difficult if done properly. We try to coach clients who wish to represent themselves, but this isn't as frustration-free or cost effective as it seems. Some aspects of the divorce legal process are easy to teach and some aspects are next to impossible, e.g., how to answer when the judge asks an entirely unpredictable question (they do it to attorneys all the time).
I often ask the client to consider how easy it would be for them to teach me teach me how to do their job if they had to the teaching while sitting in my office. None of us knows how much we know until we try to explain it to someone else.
I coached one client on several of the larger aspects of representing himself in an uncontested divorce, only to realize how difficult it was to cover some of the seemingly insignificant basics. The client learned the important steps easily enough, but it became time consuming when it came to explaining the mechanical things like how to schedule his court date or how to be sure to get his court file into the correct courtroom. These smaller things can be numerous and they are frustrating to both the lawyer and to the client.
At first glance it may seem easy to show someone how to cut the grass, but this changes when we realize how all-encompassing and difficult it is to teach the things that are now second nature to us, e.g., how to get to the garage that the lawnmower is stored in, how to open that tricky garage door, how to answer if someone unexpectedly inquires when the oil was changed last, etc.
Most clients say they would be better off by having a lawyer do all the work in the first place. We find it difficult to disagree.
Why did you decide to be a lawyer?
To learn the ins and outs of society's rules so that I could help others. However, back then, helping others was just a concept. I did not have a true idea of how good it felt to help others until I actually did it. There is nothing like it.
Just think of how good you feel after your give directions to a driver that is lost, or how good you feel when you tell the person in the next car that his left rear tire is going flat, or when you tell someone they just dropped an envelope. Now, imagine how good it would make you feel if you were part of something that could spare a child from several years of pain. You cannot measure it.
What divorce lawyers do is a rare opportunity and a privilege.
What work experience and education helps you be a better lawyer?
Harvard Law School.
After practicing divorce law for some 35 years, I had the good fortune to be accepted in Harvard Law School's prestigious Program on Negotiation for Lawyers. This was in the fall of 1998 and this one week Workshop was conducted by author and law professor Emeritus, Roger Fisher, who is reputed to be one of America's top negotiators.
I had undergone mediation training and certification a year earlier and this, coupled with Harvard's approach to dispute resolution, fascinated me like nothing in the law had ever done before. I knew then where I could do the most good as a lawyer, and I knew that the settlement approach to divorce was where I wanted to wind down my professional career.
From there I did more training in Advanced Family Law Mediation at Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, California (1998), and then returned to Harvard in 2000 to partake in its first Mediation Training for Lawyers. I went back to Cambridge in the summer of 2001 for Harvard's Advanced Negotiation Training for Lawyers. In 2002, I returned to Pepperdine for training in collaborative law.
Since then, I have rigorously continued to train and learn everything possible about the ever evolving and always improving world of cooperative dispute resolution.
Why did you decide on your primary area of practice?
I believe that lawyers gravitate to the field that they get the most cases in. The more we work in one field is the more we learn it and the better it becomes. Divorce law and its procedures change constantly and it is easier to keep up with the changes if we are there every day as they are happening.
Divorce work is unique; some lawyers like it and some don't. We deal with people when they are at their worst and this makes it a job. But these people turn over the reins of their life to us, and this makes it more than a job. It makes it an opportunity. It provides the lawyer with an opportunity to become more fulfilled personally.
Our clients give us the power to lead them and their families out of the pain and the trouble they are in. They give us their trust. We cannot always do all the good that we wish we could do, but when we meet the task with the best of our ability, we achieve a degree of personal satisfaction that is rare in other fields of endeavor.
What do you like best about your career?
There is nothing I prefer to do more than talk and write about what I have learned about the art of settling a divorce case.
I took the Harvard principles (and my 350 plus hours of conflict resolution training) and combined them with my four decades of seasoning in the trenches of divorce court. Then I threw in some common sense and streets smarts (I did grow up in a Chicago neighborhood) and then mixed it all up.
The result is my 2009 non-fiction book, The Secret to a Friendly Divorce. It contains breakthrough information that the public deserves to know about how they can avoid or minimize the frustration and expense of the divorce legal system. The book reveals exactly what to say and do to persuade one's spouse to agree to a cooperative, out-of-court settlement. It is based on the very same settlement technique that divorce mediators use to get their own spouses to agree to settle out of court.
Tell us about your law firm:
Our motto is "Our Family Looking Out for Yours," and we mean it. Everyone on our staff is sensitive to the understanding and attention that our clients expect from us and deserve. Our firm is purposely small and we intend to keep it this way.
We like to think of ourselves as big city lawyers with a small town mentality.
What are your strengths and style?
They tell me I have a unique way of saying things and of getting to the point. However, and based on my lengthy answers to these questions, I have to question their judgment.
Personal Interests:
Spending time with my wife, my daughters, and my friends; trying to learn how to hit a golf ball, cruising on my pontoon boat, talking about what it takes to settle a divorce case, and constantly rewriting my book.
Office Manager/Assistant
Krystyna
Fax
(630) 928-0670
Office Hours
Monday through Friday
9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Some Saturdays and Sundays in Oak Brook (by appointment).
Emergency After Hours
No
Additional Offices
Chicago, IL
Dearborn Station
47 W. Polk Street
Suite M11
Chicago, IL 60605
(312) 235-0100
Fixed-Price Services and Fees
We charge a flat fee of $2,500 plus filing costs for uncontested divorces.
Hourly Rates
$395 for me and $345 for Kari Cornelison.
Free Initial Consultation?
Telephone consultations (10 to 15 minutes) are without charge. Our initial office consultation flat fee of $225 is the greatest value we offer. These meetings generally last from one to one and a half hours.
Typical Retainer
$3,850.
Nolo's Licensing Check
Attorneys have passed a licensing check. Nolo has confirmed that every member attorney has a valid license and is in good standing with the applicable bar associations upon joining the directory.
Directory lawyers are required to notify Nolo immediately if they become the subject of any disciplinary action by any bar association.
