There are few hard and fast rules when it comes to separation and divorce. While many decisions that you make are going to be up to you, I would always point out that, in general, the time after a woman makes the decision to separate from her husband is potentially particularly dangerous. I don’t...
Do I have to tell him I met with a divorce attorney?
It’s October again, which means that it’s domestic violence awareness month. Before I started working in family law, I’m not sure I realized how prevalent domestic violence actually is. It’s not all dramatic cases where there are protective orders, either. I can’t get over – even now, after over 12 years in practice –...
I like to learn things. I admit it; I do. Back in the days when I was in school, I used to love the day that the teacher handed out the syllabus and I got to see all the things I was going to get to learn over the course of the semester. I...
Last month, for the first time, we hosted one of our monthly divorce seminars during our lunch hour. For the past 30+ years we have been teaching monthly divorce seminars about what Virginia women need to know, mostly on the Second Saturday of the month. Over time, we expanded our offering to include a Third...
Cohabitation is a key component of legal separation in Virginia. For a lot of reasons – chief among them being the fact that separation is a sort of loosey goosey concept here in Virginia – we get lots of questions about separation. When are you separated? Am I separated? Do we have to sign something to...
As you may have recently heard, we’ve transitioned our thirty year old baby, Second Saturday: What Every Virginia Woman Needs to Know About Divorce, from a seminar to a webinar on Zoom. It was a change that was both made necessary by the pandemic and also just reality; people want to turn more and more to...
Well, it finally happened – we’re moving forward into this century (hats off to you, COVID-19, for pushing us to push the envelope!) and moving our live monthly divorce seminars to a digital webinar format. It really does feel momentous. In the 9 years since I’ve been with the firm, I’ve had to present the divorce...
As far as procedure is concerned, adultery cases are some of the most difficult fault based divorce cases you can come across in Virginia. You have to meet a pretty strict standard of proof to satisfy the judge, you have to have a corroborating witness, and, of course, you have to follow all the local...