I’ve talked about custody every which way from Sunday, but often with more emphasis on shared physical custody than primary physical custody, even though moms almost always tell me, within minutes of our first meeting, that they want sole custody of their children. Failing that, of course, the next best thing is often primary physical...
Primary Physical Custody and Child Support
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...
Recently, on Facebook, as I mindlessly scrolled (come on, you know you do it, too) I saw a video that showed a child fighting a visitation exchange. The video alleged that the child was resisting going to spend time with her mother, because her mother’s boyfriend abused her. The end of it – the moral,...
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...
In many cases, it’s not necessary to use fault based grounds for divorce. After all, if you file on fault, you’ll have to litigate to prove to the judge that your grounds exist. Because, depending on the grounds, different civil and criminal penalties apply, you’ll have to meet a specific burden of proof, and that...
Bringing a baby into the world is, simultaneously, one of the most wonderful and most terrifying things that can happen to a woman. Having done it twice now myself – both c-sections, the first one an emergency – I can attest to that, for sure. I don’t think I fully appreciated the changes that motherhood...
It’s hard to have a child with special needs. In this instance, I’m defining “special needs” pretty broadly, to include anything from a child so disabled that he or she will never live independently, and something as small as a general IEP or 504 plan for ADD. A “special need”, as far as I’m concerned,...
People care for children every single day and haven’t been to court to have custody and visitation determined. In most cases, those people don’t really worry about custody; they just have their kid, and they take care of him (or her). Things only really start to become a problem when there’s turmoil in the relationship...