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...
What Does Best Interests Of The Child Mean?
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,...
We get a lot of consultations that are scheduled, and then rescheduled, rescheduled again, and sometimes even flat out cancelled. I get it. It’s scary. And coming in for a divorce consultation with a real lawyer can seem like a step that you may or may not be ready to take. I’ve compared it...
Recently, a woman responded to one of our Facebook posts about our free divorce and custody books, saying, simply, “Step One: Don’t get married.” I’m sure she thought she was being cute and clever. Certainly, if you don’t get married, you don’t need to get divorced. And I’m sure that, if you’re looking divorce square...
If I had a quarter for every time a client asked me about supervised visitation, I’d have an awful lot more quarters than the number of cases where I’ve seen supervised visitation actually get awarded. It’s not like an annulment, which is essentially a unicorn, but it’s not very common, either. In fact, it’s pretty...
I was talking to a woman the other day who was asking me all sorts of things about her upcoming custody case and the decisions she should be making. The (first time) mother of a very young son, she had never navigated this kind of territory before. Though she hoped to be able to reach...
We talked on Monday about two of the big problems associated with finding a form separation agreement on the internet. There are all sorts of issues you can run into in family law cases, and, in an ideal world, you’d be informed about exactly what they are and what you can expect. A good way...
In a lot of ways, child support is one of the easiest issues in a divorce or custody case. It’s one of those things that is more or less easily established, since the calculation is based on a formula. You plug in certain criteria – the incomes of each of the parents, the cost for...