Holidays are hard. They’re always hard. I field questions about holidays probably almost every single day. Generally speaking, holidays are alternated between parents. We alternate legal holidays – the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. We usually alternate Christmas and Spring Break, too, to varying degrees, both to reflect the need for...
Custody and Visitation on Halloween
In case you weren’t already aware, Veteran’s Day is coming up! And this year, like the last couple years, we’re running a special to thank female military service members and military wives for their service to our country. If you’re currently serving in the military, or your spouse is currently serving, and you’re considering a...
Financial abuse is a major issue in many divorce cases, especially when there’s a big disparity in income between the parties. For two spouses with a roughly similar income (even if that income isn’t super large), the act of separating and setting up separate houses, though difficult, isn’t nearly as complicated or as consuming as...
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...
Under Virginia law, you are free to elect to handle your own family law case in the Virginia courts. Depending on the complexity of your case and the issues involved, though, it may be more or less possible to do so. Family law cases cover several varieties – juvenile court cases (custody, visitation, child support,...
Strategically, in a divorce, there are a lot of different decisions that you can make, depending on a number of factors. Since money is often the biggest issue in divorce (second only to custody, if there are minor children involved), spousal support can take center stage fairly early on, especially if your husband has cut...
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...