Blog

Typically, a divorce is not the time that you expect someone to be at their most functional. Divorce is stressful, messy, and painful, and it’s absurdly easy to make it much, much worse with a single angry comment. And because of our society’s inherent tendency to view men as more aggressive, we also tend to be much more ready to ...

Last week, we talked about exactly why the language in MCL 750.213a is profoundly flawed in a way that will likely cause some doctors to simply stop talking about abortion to pregnant women. I mentioned that it was relevant to family law, but I didn’t talk much about how — or about why the law’s flaws were so important. It’s ...

This isn’t exclusively a family law issue, but it’s closely related to several, and it shines a light on a political factor that makes being a family lawyer extremely difficult at times. Governor Snyder recently signed into law Michigan House Bill 4787, which makes it a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion. This law was completely unnecessary ...

Simply put, from the moment you believe that a divorce is inevitable, you need to be on your best behavior. Of course, that’s just common sense — but what if you’ve already been off your best behavior for quite a while? If you’re intelligent enough to notice that your behavior needs adjusting, congratulations: you’re already way ahead of most poorly-behaved ...

You may remember the furor earlier this year when the Michigan legislature passed a bill that made “the abominable and detestable crime against nature” (defined way back in English Common Law in 1533 as ‘anal penetration or bestiality’)  leap back into the foreground of the public consciousness for a couple of weeks. Many national news outlets ran with the headline ...

One of the most basic assumptions we have about the money left to us by our deceased relatives is that it’s our money. And in most cases, that’s pretty reliable — but divorce is not most cases. As it turns out, there are many ways that a pile of money (and this applies to any significant windfall, but is most ...

When you have a child, you’re eligible for a Dependent Tax Exemption (DTE) of the same size as the basic “I’m a person” exemption. But there’s a catch — if you and the other parent file separately, only one of you can claim the exemption. This makes sense; the IRS doesn’t want to give parents two exemptions from a single ...

Division of property as part of a divorce gets pretty hairy in even the best of cases. But what happens when the process is complicated by a antenuptial agreement and several limited-liability companies? As it turns out, according to the Michigan Supreme Court, you can actually end up with a martial estate worth zero dollars. A Crazy Antenuptial Agreement In ...

As Family Law attorneys, we encounter a lot of interesting…and some sheerly desperate…ideas about how a recently-divorced single parent can get by. Often, these come up when the other parent files a custody-change motion or a support-change motion in response to one of these more desperate ideas. For example: what happens when a single mother wants to save child support ...

Once we’ve helped someone with a divorce along with a joint custody agreement, they tend to move on with their lives and never come back into our office. When they do come back with a complaint that they want our legal help with, a startling number of them have the same complaint. It’s “my ex just enrolled my child in activity, ...