Modification of Support Orders due to COVID-191 min read

If you approach your divorce with the mindset that divorce is war, then you will seek to win battles, defend your position, prepare to attack, and stockpile ammunition. Your adversarial mindset may place your children in danger of becoming casualties of your war. If instead, you adopt a cooperative mindset, your divorce can be a transformative journey, where you look optimistically towards the future, engage in thoughtful decision making and determine your own path. Your children can be your fellow travelers. The mindset you choose will create and shape your divorce experience. In our current culture too many divorcing couples are influenced by the concept that divorce is destructive like war rather than seeing divorce as a transformative process, a journey where positive change and…

The most common issue that parties negotiate when a Family Residence is part of their marital estate is whether it will be listed for sale, or whether one party will keep the home and “buyout” the other party’s interest. There are other options that the couple might consider, but for the most part the parties are weighing the two basic options of whether to sell or stay. Sometimes parties will arrive at their first mediation session with the Family Residence already in escrow or listed for sale. Other times they have decided that Husband or Wife will keep the residence and they have calculated and agreed on how much money the party keeping the home will pay the other party as a “buyout” amount. The…

Many of us learned the gymnastic term the “twisties” this week when the news broke that world-renowned gymnast, Simone Biles, had withdrawn from the women’s all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympics. “I just don’t trust myself as much as I used to,” Biles told reporters in Tokyo and she stated that she “wanted to focus on her mental health.” Apparently, getting “the twisties” is a gymnast’s biggest nightmare. The twisties are described as a mysterious phenomenon — suddenly a gymnast is no longer able to do a twisting skill he or she has done thousands of times before. Elle Reeve, a CNN reporter who used to compete in gymnastics said the twisties are a condition where, “Your body just won’t cooperate, your brain loses track…

This is the second part of a Three-Part Article on best practices for mediating the disposition of the Family Residence. Last week’s blog focused on the important considerations and questions that need to be addressed when the parties are deciding whether to sell or stay in the family home. This article will assume that the parties have agreed to list the Family Residence for sale. Mediators and other divorce professionals should rely on a step-by-step process that they routinely implement to ensure that their clients consider all the practical and financial issues involved in selling the Family Residence. In most cases, the parties will have a myriad of concerns and fears that include not just financial concerns, but also fears related to moving from a…

Although a mediator should never provide “legal counsel or advice” to either party, a good divorce mediator may need to provide the parties with basic legal information or specific legal rules that are applicable to the disputed issues in their case. Sometimes when parties have an early proposal for resolving a particular issue in their case, they will quickly abandon their original proposal when they are presented with the “vanilla version” of the law by their mediator. If they discover that their proposed division of a particular asset or asset group is not supported by the law, they may immediately want to resolve the issue in a more equitable manner. For example, when the parties learn that retirement assets earned during the marriage are community…

Many people will advise divorcing couples to rely on their attorneys and the Judge assigned to their case to obtain the best result in their divorce proceedings. Divorcing couples and their well meaning friends and family members may believe that the court will be the best place to solve all of their family law disputes and that magically the Judge will know what to do in their case and will grant them all their wishes in the divorce. Like Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion who are “off to see the Wizard” and travel to the Emerald City because they are certain the Wizard of Oz will provide them all they desire, divorcing couples go to the Courthouse eager to present…