Life Events Can Cause Problems With the IRS

Did you know that changes in your lifestyle could affect your taxes? When these changes happen, you will need to make adjustments to avoid creating IRS Problems.
Have you recently gotten married? If you have changed your name, you will need to notify Social Security to get your name changed on your card. [...]

Happy (belated) Blogiversary to Me

One year ago yesterday, I made my first post to this blog. Over the past year, the daily readership, and your comments, have grown. To those of you reading, please accept my thanks. And please keep coming back. Thanks!

This Week’s Sign That The Apocolypse Is Upon Us

This from a blog called Sid in The City:
Apparently officials in Broward County, Florida, don’t spend their waking hours fretting about the divorce rate in this country, because they just made getting a divorce even easier than it was. You can now do it online. The new county service provides for Divorce Applications, Motions for [...]

More on Alternative Billing

A little while ago I posted here regarding my belief that alternatives to hourly billing were best in many, if not most, cases, including family law cases. Ben Stevens at the South Carolina Family Law Blog has taken up the issue. Here is Ben’s latest post on this subject (and, for what it is worth, [...]

Wedding Performed By Minister Ordained Via Internet Invalidated By PA Judge

PhillyBurbs.com reports that a judge in York County, Pennsylvania has invalidated a marriage performed by a “minister” who was ordained over the internet by the Universal Life Church (the same outfit discussed in a New York Times article to which I linked in a previous post). Pennsylvania law specifies the categories of people authorized to [...]

Tips For Success At Your Settlement Conference

Many cases can get settled simply by getting the parties together to talk. This type of informal meeting is called a “settlement conference.” The following steps can help you prepare for a settlement conference and improve the chances of its success:
1. Identify the issues in your case.
2. Understand how the law affects your [...]

Great Wedding! But Was It Legal?

In an era of six-figure weddings when couples obsess about the band playlist and hand towels for the restrooms, one question may get short shrift: Is the person performing the wedding legally able to do so?
Daniel Morales and Gwendolyn Baxter thought they knew. Their outdoor ceremony two summers ago in Farmington, Conn., was performed by [...]

Litigant Blogs Facts of Case

It was bound to happen. Maybe it is not the first family law case to be blogged by a litigant, but it’s the first I have seen. I found it troubling to see a party to a pending case blogging his evidence on the internet. We assume judges read blogs. If I represented the opposing [...]

A Taxonomy of Family Court Judges

Divorce Magazine offers a description of the various “judge types” who may sit on your family law case. While I have some disagreements with some of the descriptions, and some of them are a bit redundant, there are more than a few grains of truth in the piece. I have run into most of the [...]

More on Alec’s Tua Culpa

The New York Times today more or less panned Alec Baldwin’s appearance on the soon to be Rosie-less “The View,” during which he offered a fairly self serving explanation for his outburst against his daughter, and attacked the family law system. I am inclined to agree that Baldwin did not do himself any favors with [...]