Under the law, a child magically becomes an adult on their 18th birthday. But what does that mean, and how does it impact custody and visitation? When you have an older teenaged child, what options do you have? What does the court allow? These are all good questions, and, if you’re the parent of an...
Custody and Child Support of Older Teenagers
Temporary Agreements are complicated issues in divorce and custody cases. If your husband (or child’s father) proposes one, you should proceed with extreme caution. That being said, we often use temporary agreements for all sorts of reasons. I’m working on one right now for a client who needs custody and spousal support determined on a...
No way around it, dividing up parenting time with your child’s father is a scary task. For most moms, the thought that you won’t be able to be with your child any time you like is overwhelming. It’s especially overwhelming since July 1, since new legislation came down. I wrote a post awhile back updating...
Custody cases are about as common as…well, something that’s very common. We see them literally all the time, and they can come about in a bunch of different ways. Obviously, you don’t have to be married to have a custody case; you just have to share a child in common with your former partner. So,...
To cut to the chase and state the obvious as simply as possible: if there’s no custody order in place (as in, you and your child’s father have never (1) been to court to let a judge determine custody, and (2) you’ve never signed an agreement related to custody and visitation), both you and your...
In family law cases, it seems to happen fairly often that, in litigated cases, you come before the same judge several times. Most courts, of course, do this on purpose – in order to minimize the amount of time needed at each hearing that the judge needs to familiarize himself with the facts of the...
If you’ve found your way to this page, you probably already know that, in most jurisdictions, it can take several months to get a hearing schedule on custody and visitation petitions with a juvenile court. In Chesapeake, for example, it takes 90 days for the court to review the petitions, and usually another 90 to...
When it comes to facing a custody case, you probably feel like a fish out of water. And, honestly, if you don’t feel that way, you probably should. I don’t say that to scare you – I don’t ever want to just scare anybody – but only to make you aware that things that you...