An initial consultation is short, and most of it gets spent on facts you could have handed over in paper. Here is what to carry in and what to ask.
A first consultation usually runs sixty minutes, sometimes ninety, and a good deal of it disappears into establishing facts that a stack of paper could have established in four minutes. The attorney has to know who earns what, what is owed on the house, whether a court has already said something about the children, and whether anyone has moved out. If you arrive with that in a folder, the hour bends toward analysis. If you arrive with it in your memory, the hour bends toward reconstruction, and you pay the same rate for both.
What the hour is actually for
It is a diagnostic appointment, not the start of the case. The attorney is trying to work out which of several tracks your situation belongs on, what the likely range of outcomes looks like, and whether the two of you can work together for what may be a year. You are doing the same assessment in the other direction. Nobody drafts anything in the first hour, and nobody should promise you a number for the whole matter, because the cost depends almost entirely on how the other household behaves, which neither of you can see yet.
The paper that earns its space in the folder
Bring the last three pay stubs for each of you if you have them, plus the most recent W-2 and the last filed Form 1040 with its schedules, because income is the hinge on which support turns and stated salary is often not the whole picture. Bring the mortgage statement showing the principal balance and the escrow, and a recent property tax bill. Bring retirement account statements: the 401(k), the pension summary, the IRA. The Department of Labor oversees private-sector retirement plans, and dividing one takes a separate court order drafted to the plan's own rules, so the plan name matters early.
Then bring anything a court has already signed. A temporary custody order, a protective order, a prior support order from another state, a divorce decree from an earlier marriage that still carries obligations. Attorneys will tell you that existing orders change the advice more than almost anything else a client mentions late. Add a one-page timeline: date of marriage, date of separation, children's dates of birth, dates anyone moved out. Add a rough list of debts, including the credit cards in one name that were used by both.
Three questions worth the minutes they cost
First: given these facts, what is the realistic range of outcomes, and what would push a result toward each end of it? A careful answer will be a range with conditions attached, not a figure. Second: what are the next three steps, who does each one, and roughly when? This tells you whether the office has a process or improvises. Third: who will actually handle my file day to day, what does that person bill, and how do I reach them? Many matters are run by an associate or a paralegal, which is often cheaper and perfectly fine, as long as you know it before the first invoice.
Advice on the law, and advice on strategy
Legal advice is what the statutes and the local rules permit: how property is characterized in your state, what factors a judge weighs on custody, what a support calculation produces from these inputs. It is largely stable, and two competent attorneys will describe it similarly. Strategy advice is different. It is a judgment about sequence and posture: whether to file first, whether to propose mediation before or after financial disclosure, whether to accept a slightly worse split to close the matter in March rather than October. Strategy is where attorneys genuinely differ, and where the fee buys the most.
What a careful reader checks afterward
Write your notes the same day, in your own words, and mark the places where you were told a rule and the places where you were told an opinion. Read the engagement letter before signing: the hourly rates for each timekeeper, the retainer amount and whether any part of it is refundable, the billing increment, and what happens to the file if you stop. Ask for a written summary of the advice if one was not offered. Then compare what you were told against what a second attorney says, if the stakes justify a second hour.
The consultation is cheap relative to what follows, and it is the one point in the process where you are buying information rather than action. Carrying the paper in is the whole trick.