A woman who had just finished a difficult divorce asked her attorney for the final invoice. The number came back at $3,404 and change.
She posted the exchange on X in November 2023, under the handle @messydepressy6, along with screenshots of the conversation. The post has more than 151,000 likes.
She wrote to her attorney that she couldn’t cover the full amount at once, but wanted to start paying it down in installments.
Her lawyer had other plans
The reply: “You can just send me $150 to cover the actual expenses like the service, summons, and whatnot, and we’ll call it even.”
That $150 covered the hard costs, the filing, and the process-server fees the attorney had already paid out of her own pocket. The rest—several thousand dollars of her own billable time—she wrote off.
“Are you kidding me, Joy?” the client wrote back. “You’ve done so much for me and my kids.”
“It’s the holidays,” the attorney answered. “Save the money for the kids for Christmas, not for legal bills.”
Paying it forward
The client sent the $150 and then kept pushing, saying she planned to send more when she could. “You really saved me,” she wrote. “I could never repay you for what you have done for me and my family. I aspire to be an attorney with your kind heart when I’m all said and done.”
The attorney told her the matter was closed. “Go on with your life and do good with you and your kids.”
In replies to her own post, the woman said her ex-husband had been making the divorce as difficult as he could, and that her attorney stayed with the case without her having to worry about affording it. She also mentioned that she’s currently in school for criminal justice with plans to become a lawyer herself.
“I plan on being a lawyer and doing things exactly like this.”
