Blog

So you’re a parent with sole custody and you’re in the military. You get the news that you’re being deployed, and that you’re going to have to hand custody of your children over to your ex for the duration of your deployment. Is that really what’s going to happen? It depends. If your ex hasn’t been excluded from custody (usually ...

If you haven’t read Part I, start there, or this won’t make a lot of sense to you. If you have, let’s just jump right in with the next myth to be dispelled: More than Half of All Marriages End in Divorce (I.E. Marriage is Doomed Before it Starts) This myth was once true…in the 1970s and 80s. But it ...

Two fish are swimming through the water, when they meet an older fish swimming the other way. “Morning, boys! How’s the water?” The two fish swim on for a while, when one of them looks at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” This story serves to illustrate a very basic point about human life: we’re frequently so ...

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 ...