With Tamara A. Marshall, PC, Zanck, Coen, Wright & Saladin
Divorce, Family Law, General Civil Ligation Lawyer
Another question that comes up, people are concerned that if they don’t engage in the adversarial process; that they are not going to get everything that they are entitled to or they ask me: what are my legal rights?
And quite honestly family law, it’s a creature of human beings and what’s fair and how are we going to deal with each other. And yes there are laws out there where if a judge is deciding what is going to happen in your life, the judge has to follow certain guidelines and that I guess is relevant if you are going to have an adversarial process but what I tell my clients is what your rights are really is defined by what you think is fair and what your spouse thinks is fair so it’s really not rocket science.
In the family law process, we are deciding who gets what stuff, who is going to pay what bills. If there is income coming in, where is that income going to flow? How are we going to make sure the kids are okay? Where are they going to be spending their time? What’s going to happen if one of them gets sick? Who is going to provide them with medical insurance? How are we going to pay their medical bills? So these are all things that folks deal with every day in everyday life.
And so I think once we get into the process of answering these questions about what their rights are, it really is more: how are things going to look when her family takes a different form? So I think they realize that they are well-equipped and well enough informed to make these decisions so that it becomes more questions of what’s best for me and my family as opposed to, “what are my rights?”