Whenever there is domestic violence involved in a case, we advise our clients about protective orders. It’s really one of the only tools in our arsenal available to help protect clients who are at risk from their former partners. On the one hand, it’s just a piece of paper. On the other, it works in...
Domestic Violence and Virginia Protective Orders
One of the attorneys in our office recently had a consultation with a woman who couldn’t get what she wanted. It wasn’t her fault; it wasn’t our fault. In this case, the law simply didn’t allow for it to happen. What did she want? She wanted child support to extend for her nearly-adult child to...
Can you recommend a private investigator for me? In family law cases, people use private investigators for all sorts of things. Usually, it’s to catch a cheating husband. But, sometimes, we also use private investigators to watch dad during his parenting time, or to discover some unsavory business practices in which he might be engaged....
I heard a new one the other day. It doesn’t happen all that often, at this stage in the game, but yesterday it did. I was talking to a woman who told me that her child’s father, after their divorce, tried to one-up her in every single way imaginable – even with the tooth fairy!...
Drug or alcohol use can pose problems in a Virginia child custody case, as you can probably pretty well imagine. Judges – who are notoriously conservative, especially in Virginia, and especially when it comes to things like drug use – don’t like it. In Virginia (as in pretty much everywhere), custody cases always comes down...
Text messages are valuable evidence in a lot of cases. We need access to this information all the time, and we often request that our clients provide us with their text message history. Our client’s husbands also often provide text messages or emails as proof of some contention or another. When that happens, almost without...
In many ways, contested or uncontested, your divorce is a negotiation. In most cases, regardless of whether you initially file on fault, your divorce will ultimately be settled. That’s not a dig; in fact, it’s an ideal situation. Rather than leaving it up to a judge, you and your husband can reach an agreement about...
Technically, any court anywhere in Virginia has jurisdiction over your divorce. So, even if you live in Virginia Beach, your husband could file for divorce in Fairfax, if he wanted to—just to be difficult. Usually it doesn’t happen just because someone wants to be difficult (because he’d have to drive to and from Fairfax for...
