Brittney Griner has filed for divorce from her wife, Cherelle Griner, after eight years of marriage. That alone is unremarkable news. What makes it interesting is the fact that Cherelle is a practicing attorney and the same person who spent ten months as the country's most visible advocate for Brittney's release from Russian detention in 2022. Somebody in this marriage knows exactly how the legal system works, and it isn't Brittney.
According to the petition, filed July 31 in Fulton County, Georgia, the couple separated on July 24 and describe the marriage as “irretrievably broken,” with no hope of reconciliation. Brittney is asking for joint physical custody of their son, Bash, and an “equitable division” of marital assets and debts. The whole thing reads like exactly what you'd expect when one half of the marriage happens to be a lawyer: clean, direct, and free of anything a judge would need to squint at.
Does it matter that your spouse is a lawyer?
So, what changes when the person you’re divorcing also happens to know the law? Actually, not much.
Being an attorney doesn't let you write your own settlement terms, skip discovery, or convince a judge that a law degree earns a better outcome. Courts don't grade the paperwork on resumé. Custody still turns on the child's best interests. Property still gets divided according to the rules of whatever state has jurisdiction, not according to who understood those rules first.
What it does affect — significantly — is the level of comfort. A spouse who's spent years around litigation isn't intimidated by deadlines, doesn't panic at legal terminology, and knows the difference between a request that holds up and one that invites months of unnecessary fighting. That's an advantage, but it's a procedural one, not a substantive one.
Can a lawyer represent themselves in their own divorce?
In Washington State, yes. Self-representation is allowed in any civil case, including divorce, and courts hold self-represented parties to the same standards as everyone with counsel. There's no lower bar and no extra patience, just because you know the rules.
Which is exactly why almost no attorney actually does it.
Divorce involves you personally, and that's a hard case to argue with a clear head, no matter how many other people's divorces you've handled. Attorneys tend to hire outside counsel for their own cases for a few practical reasons:
- Objectivity is difficult to manufacture when the outcome affects your own family.
- A lawyer representing themselves has no one to talk them out of a decision made in anger.
- Being both the witness and the advocate in your own case creates complications a neutral attorney doesn't have.
The old line about a lawyer who represents themselves having a fool for a client exists for a reason, and it applies just as much to family law as anywhere else.
About that “equitable division”
At this point, it’s worth noting that Georgia divides marital property under equitable distribution, meaning a court splits assets fairly, not necessarily equally. Washington works differently. As a community property state, most assets and debts acquired during the marriage are presumed to belong to both spouses equally, regardless of whose name sits on the account.
That distinction matters — where you file can shape what “fair” means before a judge ever weighs in on a single fact.
The takeaway, for the rest of us
Griner's petition doesn't tell us much about what happened in the marriage. It tells us the person who drafted it wanted a clean process in which there is no public feud and no unnecessary disputes.
That's good advice whether or not you're married to a lawyer. If you're navigating a divorce in the Evergreen State and want to know what “equitable division” or “community property” actually means for your situation, LaGrandeur & Williams can walk you through it — reach out to us.