As everyone always says, there’s no book on how to be a good parent. The nurses at the hospital didn’t send you home with a manual. There are books and online courses and old wives tales, but there’s no consensus on how to raise a child in the best way possible. We all screw up...
Spare the Child: Virginia Custody Disputes
I’ve said it before and, though it pains me, I’ll say it again. Where domestic violence and child abuse are concerned, the court is very, very jaded. It’s not just the courts, either. Attorneys, too, can become jaded. We hear terrible stories, day in and day out, and, sometimes, they’re not true, or they’re...
Boundaries are a hard thing for women everywhere. There are a million reasons, but I think that most of us feel essentially required to take care of the feelings of everyone around us. The feeling that we’ve disappointed someone is almost physically painful, and we take a lot of abuse – we’re programmed, in a...
Most people want to avoid extensive litigation if at all possible. After all, it makes a case take longer, cost more, and (generally speaking) yield poorer results. Most people, after getting a couple bills from their attorney, will suddenly become much less litigious. Most people, of course, are fairly sensible. They’ll instead start to...
Most people have a lot of questions about the divorce process – even if they understand the basics. After all, there’s a lot that is really fact specific, and it can be hard to apply a general principle to a specific situation. Even if you can sort of guess what the answer might be, you...
I was recently reading a book (that I mentioned in the articles I shared with you on Monday and Wednesday of this week as well), where the author, Greg Ellis, alleged that, in his high conflict divorce and custody case spanning over 5 years and costing in excess of a million dollars, family law attorneys...
Cases where we know – or suspect – that there’s abuse happening are some of the worst for about a million different reasons. If you just take them at face value, there’s the obvious issue that we’re concerned that a child is suffering physical, emotional, or sexual abuse at the hands of their other parent....
I follow up with women who’ve had consults with us – with any of our attorneys, not just the ones who meet with me – after their appointments, just to make sure that they got their questions answered in the appointment. I find that, in a lot of cases, they either forgot to ask something,...