What You Don't Know in Divorce or Custody Case Can Hurt You

In this video I share a personal experience about how NOT knowing the rules really hurt me & how it relates to your family law case.

What you DON'T know can have detrimental consequences that could affect the rest of your family's life. When you are in the midst of a custody battle or a divorce everything is on the line whether it be determining child custody, how much alimony or child support you will receive, parenting time and many other things in your family law case.

So, I will use an example in my own life where I didn’t make it my business to know the rules and I ended up in a very stressful ordeal and ended up having to hire an attorney myself.

So in my private practice I had an employee who some might call a ‘trouble’ employee. One day she fell in the kitchen in an office that I share with a whole bunch of other lawyers and apparently hurt herself. At the same time the other attorneys in this office find out that this employee had been hacking into their computer system and wreaking havoc on the system.

So they came to me and said that she was not allowed back into the office, even if she is your employee, do what you have to do, but she can’t come back to this office.

So essentially what that meant was if my employee could not come into the office then she could not work for me, which put me into a bind because I could not run my practice without an assistant so I had to let her go.

It turns out her injury from falling in the office kitchen got worse and her doctor told her to find out from me what was my workers’ compensation insurance was. Well I didn’t know that I was required to have workers’ compensation insurance. It never occurred to me. I went to law school. I didn’t go to school to learn how to run a business.

So what ended up happening is she hired an attorney and the attorney got in touch with me. This was a very stressful time in my life with letters going back and forth between her attorney and my attorney and each time I received my attorney’s bill I would get sick to my stomach because I knew it was going to be a high bill.

What ended up happening is we settled out of court. It was around Christmas time and she needed the money, so I offered her money and she took it and the case was over.

But it did cause a lot of pain in my life, I lost sleep, I cried, I hated it. And the point is I didn’t know that I needed to have workers comp insurance. Again I had not gone to business school so I didn’t know anything about the RULES of owning your own business and what you had to have when you had employees.

The same thing applies to your family law case. You did not go to law school, so you are not going to know the rules in your divorce or custody case unless you make it your business to find out what the rules of the court are.

So to be prepared for your child custody or divorce hearing you can achieve this in one of two ways:

1. You can go out and hire a family law attorney because of course it is their business is to know the divorce rules rules in your state

2. If you can’t afford a lawyer, then you are going to have to represent yourself so you are going to have to go out and hit the books and prepare yourself for your family law or custody case and the rules in your jurisdiction

- Rules of procedure for your state
- What the judge will expect of you in court
-What questions the judge will ask you

Make it your business to know the rules because it can really affect the rest of yours and your family’s life. Don’t’ let what you don’t know get in the way of what’s fair and is the best interest of your children.