OCTOBER 26, 2020 BY KATIE CARTER Contested cases are hard on everyone involved. I work with women, so my perspective is often that of the wife and mother. I actually rarely see children. It’s really not appropriate; for me to do my job, I have to have conversations with my client that could be harmful for...
Should my child be in therapy during my custody case?
Though divorce attorneys are no strangers to pretty salacious details coming out in lots of our cases (sorry, though, it’s all confidential!), every so often there’s a detail or a case that surprises even us. There’s a pretty shocking case pending before the Supreme Court right now that originated out of the Virginia Beach Circuit...
Today, I’ve been practicing family law, representing women exclusively, for a little over 9 years. I’m inching ever closer towards a decade of dedicated, women only, divorce and custody practice. There are still new, novel issues that present themselves – I am told, from veterans like Lori Michaud and Sheera Herrell, that it is always this way, even...
Recently, on Facebook, as I mindlessly scrolled (come on, you know you do it, too) I saw a video that showed a child fighting a visitation exchange. The video alleged that the child was resisting going to spend time with her mother, because her mother’s boyfriend abused her. The end of it – the moral,...
It’s not always possible for a couple to say, at the very beginning of the process, that they will or won’t ultimately get divorced. For many, there’s a desire to save the marriage, if at all possible. In some of those cases, a marital agreement may be one way to at least attempt to save...
In many cases, it’s not necessary to use fault based grounds for divorce. After all, if you file on fault, you’ll have to litigate to prove to the judge that your grounds exist. Because, depending on the grounds, different civil and criminal penalties apply, you’ll have to meet a specific burden of proof, and that...
When it comes to divorce, there’s often a lot of fear involved. One of the biggest fears – for husbands and wives – is the threat of litigation. Litigation, though useful in certain circumstances, is complicated. It’s incredibly costly, with parties often spending far, far more than their counterparts pay for negotiated, mediated, or collaborative...
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,...