On Monday, I wrote about Virginia’s child support guideline calculations, and what might happen to child support in a situation where a mom, who previously stayed at home, re-entered the workforce. I wrote the article for a couple of reasons, but mostly because I’ve recently encountered two different attitudes. One was a woman, telling me...
Child Support
There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the child support guidelines. Though I often hear from women that they don’t know how they’re going to support themselves post separation and, ultimately, post divorce, I don’t think there’s a lot of really robust conversation surrounding that topic, which can make it hard for women to know how...
Today, I’ve been practicing family law, representing women exclusively, for a little over 9 years. I’m inching ever closer towards a decade of dedicated, women only, divorce and custody practice. There are still new, novel issues that present themselves – I am told, from veterans like Lori Michaud and Sheera Herrell, that it is always this way, even...
You can’t get very far down the road in a custody and visitation case without coming up against “best interests of the child”. There’s a version of the best interests factors in almost every state (at least, as far as I’m aware), and these factors make up the basis of how custody and visitation cases...
Most of the time, child support is easy peasy. It’s based on a formula, so, basically, we just fill in the blanks and the number pops up. Of course, if yours is a shared custody situation, it can be a little more complicated than in a traditional primary physical custody type situation. How so? Well,...
I talked to someone a couple weeks ago who had an interesting case, and I thought I’d write a little about it. Of course, I can’t divulge any confidential information, and, really, I don’t want to share anything with you other than the situation she found herself in—and the innocent way she almost made a...
When a couple has a child together, there is no custody order. There’s no “every other weekend” rule, even if mom and dad are no longer romantically involved. Married or single, it doesn’t make any difference. Babies aren’t born with rules about custody in place. Furthermore, babies are born to two parents, each of whom...
No matter how old they are, your babies are still your babies – and a custody case is still scary. Still, a custody case where older children (say, 13-14 and older or so) are involved is considerably different than a case where young kids are involved. For older children and teenagers, the school calendar has...