Your Life's Next Chapter

                                                     Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!  This is such a wonderful time of the year, isn’t it?  Beautiful holiday lights line the streets, city apartment balconies and rural homes.  The tree in Rockefeller Center in NYC and ice skating rinks where families and children are out laughing and enjoying time together; the [...]

How does mediation work?  What can I expect?  Questions I typically hear from clients who come in to my office and want to find out whether mediation really can work for them and their family.  Can divorce really be amicable?  Can they really end their marriage without the lawyers or judges telling them what they [...]

Picture/toon by: Julia McDaid Happy Thanksgiving!  One of my favorite holidays of the year.  Enjoy it all.    

If you know anyone who has been through a litigated divorce they probably have told you about their frustration, how long it took, and they probably complain about the outcome and the expense.  Fortunately, not every divorce needs to be litigated.  In fact, I believe that anyone involved in a divorce does not have to [...]

       Divorce is a verb and, simply put, is the legal means by which to end one’s marriage.  It is how spouses “divorce” (the verb) themselves from each other as a joint union and become single individuals in the eyes of the law.  Another, more technical way to state it is that divorce is [...]

When a couple decides to separate or end their marriage, the first important issue that is typically discussed is whether to legally separate or divorce.  The primary difference between these is that when a couple is legally separated they may not marry another party, but if the couple is divorced, they are each free to [...]

  Some people are under the mistaken impression that now that New York allows couples to file for no fault divorce, that is the only ground (or reason) for divorce.  However, that simply is not the case.  New York State did not “erase” the grounds that we had before no fault and replace them.  Instead, [...]

 In October, 2010, New York State became the last state in the country to recognize no-fault divorce.  This means that a spouse can seek the dissolution of the marriage based upon the “irretrievable breakdown in the marriage”.   So long as the economic issues are resolved by the parties or determined by the court, the marriage [...]

In New York State, the division of marital property and debts in a divorce is referred to as “equitable distribution”. Equitable distribution is not necessarily an equal fifty-fifty split of the assets and debts. Sometimes equitable distribution will comprise of an equal division of assets and debts and sometimes it will be an unequal allocation [...]

If my spouse committed adultery, do I get a larger portion of marital assets? In other words, if one spouse is to blame for the reason for divorce, will the “good” spouse be rewarded in court through a more favorable distribution of assets settlement? It would seem good reason that if there was misconduct on [...]