Avoiding those mistakes will improve your results and reduce stress and frustration. In general, a little more case analysis and persuasion planning will avoid much needless frustration. Underestimating Judicial Discretion. I am impressed with how little I understood the breadth or importance of judicial discretion. For most issues, especially procedural and evidentiary ones, the trial judge is the court of last resort.
Judges have many rules to rely upon to reach a just result in an efficient manner.
Many of them contradict each other, and the judge's discretion is the tool for choosing which principle is determinative. Case law shows that judges are rarely reversed for their division of marital property. Equal property divisions are habit, not law. Judges are not required to divide the remaining marital property equally, but rather, equitably. Indeed, material differences in nonmarital wealth or income may push a trial judge to award the poorer spouse more of the marital property.