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Family Law

Pennsylvania Family Law

Covers alimony, custody, divorce, equitable distribution, and support and offer useful tips.
By Fox Rothschild

Post Frequency: 1.9/day

Last Entry: May 08, 2013 at 16:28:17

REQUIEM FOR PARENTAL COORDINATION IN PENNSYLVANIA

Posted on May 08, 2013
My colleague Aaron Weems has already reported that late last month the Pennsylvania Supreme Court put an end to what was a five year experiment with court appointed ombudsmen tasked to decide minor custody disputes where the need to have a prompt resolution outweighed an assessment of how a particular custody issue affected a child's best interests...

Native American Adoption Decision Pending from U.S. Supreme Court

Posted on May 06, 2013
In this most recent U.S. Supreme Court term, the Court has heard two cases involving the domestic relations of a state. In addition to the arguments on same sex marriage, on April 16th, the Court also heard argument on the adoption of a three-year girl...

New Rule: No Parent Coordinators Allowed

Posted on April 23, 2013
Remember earlier this year when I wrote about the Superior Court's ruling that a party has a right to a de novo hearing for a custody coordinator's decision? Well, forget all of that. As of today, April 23rd, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court adopted Rule 1915...

CREATIVE FINANCING FOR YOUR DIVORCE

Posted on April 22, 2013
Often times, and for good reason, clients have concerns about how they are going to pay for their divorce. If the case is simple, it may just be a matter of paying their attorney fees. But if it is more complicated, it could involve substantial expert fees as well...

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Mortgage Deviation as an Expense

Posted on April 17, 2013
Our friends at the Delaware Trial Practice Blog recently summarized a Delaware case involving a familiar Pennsylvania support concept - the mortgage deviation. Leslie Spoltore of our Wilmington office discusses how the court upheld the reduction of a father's support obligation by considering the mortgage expense related to the marital residence...

INTERSTATE DISCOVERY JUST GOT EASIER (MAYBE)

Posted on April 11, 2013
We live in an age when both people and transactions cross state borders more and more often. Evidence concerning what occurred in Pennsylvania is often located outside of the four corners of the Commonwealth and thus, beyond the subpoena power of Pennsylvania Courts...

PENNSYLVANIA SUPREME COURT DOESN'T RULE ON SUPPORT FOR PARENTS

Posted on April 08, 2013
Typically, the purpose of columns such as this is to report on rulings by courts. But there are times when law becomes established because courts do not rule on a particular issue. Such is the case with a ruling last week where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided not to give further consideration to a ruling by the Superior Court on an issue that has gained lots of attention in the past few years...

Mandatory Reporting - Cases Hiding in Plain Sight

Posted on April 07, 2013
(Image by Bettman/CORBIS) - Lunch at 800 feet only seems normal if you are used to it. I recently took a phone call from an individual who wanted to learn about the laws related to the emancipation of a minor. This person would not identify herself, but described herself as a 'case worker' who was calling for a family friend who wished to remain anonymous: a fifteen year old girl who wanted to become emancipated from her parents due to what she described to the case worker as abusive conditions...

Name Change Fight Exposes Parental Alienation

Posted on March 27, 2013
(Image: http://www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/sketch-product/your-name-here) A recent case involving the name change of a child highlighted the relevance change of name cases can have on custody litigation. The case (In re: Change of Name of W...

Narcissistic Mother Chooses Husband over her Neglected Children

Posted on March 15, 2013
Child abuse cases are extremely difficult to deal with by the court and attorneys. Making them worse is when a parent is unable to accept the reality that a spouse - the abuser - has to be cut out of their lives if they hope to keep their children. A recent case in Berks County is such a situation...

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: A GUIDE FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY

Posted on March 05, 2013
The immediate prompt for this brief article is the report on February 23, 2013 that Tiger Woods and his ex -wife Elin Nordegren were spotted at an event where they spoke together not for 30 seconds but 30 minutes. In one sense this is not newsworthy at all but during the week, I had a spate of cases where I know the parents or friends and family of recently separated couples and where the parents/friends/family always knew that this marriage could not last and/or the couple never belonged together or he/she changed and is now unworthy of the friend or family member...

WILMINGTON

Posted on February 27, 2013
It came over the newswires that five people had been shot and three killed in the Court House in Wilmington DE. As trial attorneys in a field where the Court Houses are part of our daily existence, hearts stopped for a moment. We have family lawyers in Wilmington and we know they go through security just as we do in Pennsylvania...

Mom Insults Son on Facebook and Loses Legal Custody

Posted on February 24, 2013
Robert Epstein of our Roseland, New Jersey office writes for the New Jersey Family Law Blog and recently posted an excellent piece on a New York custody case which is instructive for people using social media in any jurisdiction. A mother in New York posted insulting comments about her 10 year old son on Facebook...

Video Interview: Discussing the Alex Collins Story with LXBN TV

Posted on February 21, 2013
Following up on my post on the subject, I had the opportunity to speak with ColIn O'Keefe of LXBN regarding the story of Alex Collins, the high school football recruit whose mother refused to co-sign his National Letter of Intent. Alex's mother took the letter to an attorney and temporarily delayed his commitment to playing at the University of Arkansas next year...

Unsportsmanlike Conduct? Running Back's Mom Runs His Letter of Intent to Lawyer

Posted on February 18, 2013
College football recruiting can become, for a sought after recruit, the perfect intersection of where talent meets commoditization; in other words, recruiting is where the athletic talents of the amateur student-athlete attract the attention revenue generating college football programs...

New Rule Makes for Easier Evidence

Posted on February 17, 2013
(Photo by Indi Samarajiva) The Pennsylvania Support Rules were recently amended on December 30, 2012. Rule 1910.29, formalizes the presentation of support evidence for Family Law Cases. Anecdotally, the Rules of Evidence may not always be strictly adhered to in family law cases due to probative value of some forms of evidence weighed against the cost and difficulty of verifying it or authenticating it at trial...

4 THINGS NOT TO PUT IN YOUR ONLINE DATING PROFILE DURING A DIVORCE

Posted on February 14, 2013
While reading a press release by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers this afternoon, I realized individuals in the midst of a divorce regularly receive warnings about what is acceptable and safe to post on Facebook and what might get them in trouble...

SHALE FELLOWS NOW MET

Posted on February 11, 2013
CHAPTER I. WHAT EVERY PENNSYLVANIAN SHOULD NOW ABOUT SHALE GAS For Pennsylvanians who live below Interstate 80 and east of the Allegheny Mountains, the Marcellus shale boom is not unknown to us. But it is told mostly in the context of cocktail party stories about hunting camps being transformed into huge payments for gas rights...

Shale Fellow Now Met: Pennsylvania Minerals Rights and Shale Gas

Posted on February 11, 2013
For Pennsylvanians who live below Interstate 80 and east of the Allegheny Mountains, the Marcellus shale boom is vaguely known to us. But it is told mostly in the context of cocktail party stories about hunting camps being transformed into huge payments for gas rights...

FELS INSTITUTE ANALYSIS OF METRO PHILADELPHIA HOME PRICES 2008-2012

Posted on January 31, 2013
This is not a real estate blog but many of our clients have a heavy portion of their net worth invested in residential real estate. So when the Fels Institute of Government at Penn Published a State of the Philadelphia Housing Market in mid November we thought it worthwhile to secure and read a copy...

HOW BOILERPLATE CAN 'BOIL OVER'

Posted on January 25, 2013
Most domestic relations practitioners have fairly standard agreement clauses which they are comfortable with and use day in and day out in the preparation of property settlement agreements. We have recently encountered two seemingly innocuous 'boilerplate' clauses that can come back to bite if the document draftsperson does not consider all of what has transpired during the weeks, months or years culminating in the property settlement agreement...

Trial Court Must Conduct De Novo Hearings for Parent Coordination Appeals

Posted on January 24, 2013
Pennsylvania formalized the use of Parent Coordinators in custody cases several years ago when the Superior Court's rendered their 2007 opinion in the case of Yates v. Yates. As part of the Yates decision, the Superior Court held that the appointment of a Parent Coordinator in a high conflict custody case was a reasonable exercise of discretion and did not constitute the delegation of judicial authority to a quasi-judicial body (i...

More from Berks Co.: Court Sets Forth the Standard for a Petition for Modification of Support

Posted on January 13, 2013
Darcy Williams of our Chester County office recently provided an entry to our firm's Berks County legal blog by discussing how the Court of Common Pleas dealt with a support modification which was filed less than twenty days after an agreed order went into effect...

Berks County Court Enforces Paternity by Estoppel

Posted on January 10, 2013
J. Benjamin Nevius of our Exton, Chester County office writes for our firm's Berks County Law Update blog. Benjamin recently wrote about an excellent article about a Berks County case addressing paternity by estoppel and he has graciously allowed me to republish it here in its entirety...

FMLA Leave Expanded to Include Daycare Search

Posted on January 08, 2013
(Image: http://tennesseelabortalk.com) While this topic of this blog post is not exactly what this blog typically covers, I frequently find that litigation in another areas of law either impacts or illuminates an issue dealt with by our family law clients...

MINING THE DATA ON MARRIAGE, DIVORCE AND BIRTHS

Posted on January 08, 2013
As we all know sometimes statistics tell a story. And as we look at the evolving American family the data coming out of Pennsylvania tell an interesting story as the family has evolved over 50 years. The chart will tell most of the story: Year PA Population No...

Twitter Download Makes Account Production Easy and Risky for Clients

Posted on December 26, 2012
(Image: http://www.opencms.org/en/) The practice of family law has seen a shift in discovery in recent years with the increased use of social networking sites by clients. There are increasingly easy ways to access and download the histories of websites like Facebook; the implications to clients is what they thought were private comments to 'friends' do not evaporate into the ether of the internet, but are, instead, discoverable and producible information which may be used at trial...

ELEMENTS OF EXPENSE: HOW EMPLOYERS HELP TO MAKE YOUR LIFE EXPENSIVE & YOUR LAWYER BEWILDERED

Posted on December 13, 2012
One of the great frustrations of practicing in the domestic relations field is trying to figure out income in a world where it can be a marital asset or an element of support. That issue is primarily one of timing. The law is clear that if your company pays you a bonus on January 31 and your spouse tells you 'game over' on Ground Hog Day, your bonus is a marital asset...

NJ Family Law Blog - Bad Faith Negotiating Needs to Stop

Posted on December 10, 2012
Eric Solotoff, a partner in our Roseland, New Jersey office and editor of our New Jersey Family Law Blog recently posted a blog entry on bad faith negotiating and its detrimental effect on settling cases. Eric's point is well taken: there are times in family law cases when people lose sight of their goals and try to land a (proverbial) shot on the other person...

CONTEMPT COURT IS NOT A PLACE FOR CUSTODY MODIFICATION

Posted on November 29, 2012
In a recent custody case, the Court denied Father contact with his children except for supervised visits while they underwent therapy. Mother filed a contempt petition asserting that Father violated the custody order when he went to a school concert and videotaped both the Mother and the child while there...

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