7 Tips To Support A Family Member During A Legal Battle

Do you have a family member who is facing a legal battle? Legal issues can come about for a variety of reasons. Your family member might be in the midst of the legal battle revolving around divorce, mental or physical abuse, debt, custody battle or something else. No matter what the reason is, the legal issue can feel frightening and overwhelming for your family member. When the legal battle involves someone such as an ex-spouse, emotions can run particularly high. Here are seven tips that you can use if your family member is in the middle of a legal battle.

1. Don’t Offer Comparisons

If you have also experienced legal issues, it may feel natural to offer comparison stories to try to help your family member. While it’s definitely good to let your family members know that this kind of thing happens to a lot of people, it’s not okay to make comparisons between their case and your past experience. The reason is that every legal case has its own particulars. No case is the same. So what worked in your legal case will not necessarily work in your family member’s legal case. Instead, it’s best to simply say that you have also gone through a legal battle, and re-enforce the fact that you will be there to support the family member.

 

2. Support Their Choices

Your family member want me to make a number of very difficult decisions regarding their legal battle. Most of those decisions will be made under the advisory of an attorney. There may be one or more choices that your family member makes that you don’t fully agree with, or that you feel may be a mistake. During these times, it’s important that you support your family member’s choices when they are made with the help of a legal professional. While you may have experience fighting your own legal battle in the past, the best thing that you can do to support your family member is to defer to the decisions made with the help of a legal professional.

 

3. Don’t Implicate Yourself

When your family is embroiled in a legal battle, it’s natural that you want to do anything at all to help them. However, sometimes people can take this natural urge to help too far. They may end up implicating themselves in the eyes of the law. It’s important to keep your distance in a case like this. There will be a lot of emotions, which may include panic. When people feel panicky, they make rash decisions that they later regret. When supporting a family member during a legal battle, avoid doing things like tampering with evidence, being dishonest during your deposition, or trying to help your loved one take vindictive action. You don’t want to get yourself enmeshed in the legal battle. You want to take a neutral stance and be the rock that your family member can lean on during the crisis.

 

4. Don’t Try To Play Lawyer

There is an abundance of legal opinions and misinformation on the Internet for people who are in the middle of illegal battle. Avoiding doing a lot of the legal research on behalf of your family member in the hopes of trying to play lawyer and give them legal advice. This can have several different negative repercussions. First of all, your family member may become confused about whose advice they should take. Should they listen to their trusted family member even when the advice goes against with their own lawyer told them? You may inadvertently be making their decision-making process harder than it was before. The second negative repercussions of trying to play lawyer for your family member is that you may give them very bad advice based on something read on the internet. If they decide to listen to you instead of their attorney, you may accidentally cause them to lose the case.

 

5. Just Listen

Often what people need most when they’re in the middle of a legal battle is a trusted friend to just listen. This is both the easiest and the hardest thing that you can do to support a family member during a legal battle. Take the time to visit with your family member so that they can vent their thoughts and feelings about what they’re going through. Trying out to interject your own opinions more comment on what they said. The more you can listen objectively, the better off your family member will be.

 

6. Offer Practical Help

During this time, your family member may need practical help in their daily life. The more you can offer practical assistance the easier it they may find it too cold with dealing with the legal battle plus handling all their day today affairs. You might consider bringing over some home-cooked meals that they can just heat up in the microwave. It’s also nice to take your family member out for a meal or two so that they can get out of the house for a while. If there are children, you could offer to babysit every now and then so that they can have a night to themselves.

 

7. Encourage Legal Help

If for any reason your loved one is hesitating to hire a legal professional to represent them during the legal battle, you can be of assistance by urging them to seek legal help from Sunshine Coast Criminal Lawyers. A legal professional can help to ensure that your family member is properly represented during their legal case.

When you are watching a family member to go through this, it’s perfectly natural for you to want to support them however you can. Your family member will likely appreciate your support during this trying time. However, if you do choose to support a family member during a legal battle, it’s important that you do so in a way that’s best for you and your family member.