Recent Blog Posts
Including the Right of First Refusal in Your Parenting Plan
If you hope to share parental responsibilities for your child following a divorce or break-up, you and the other parent will need to develop an agreement for doing so. Known in Illinois as a parenting plan, this agreement is intended to allocate responsibilities to each of you, so that you both fully understand your rights and attendant obligations. The law provides a number of elements that must be covered in a parenting plan, but one, in particular, can be a major sticking point for many couples. You and your spouse will need to determine how the right of first refusal will apply to your unique situation.
Understanding First Refusal
The right of first refusal is a concept that stems from the understanding that, during your assigned parenting time, you may occasionally be required to find an alternative source of care for your child. Put simply, sometimes you need a babysitter. Whether you want a social night out with friends or you need to travel out of town for a week on business, the occasional need for a sitter is understandable.
No-Fault Divorce in Illinois Has Never Been Faster
A new report suggests that public opinion regarding divorce is beginning to shift a bit. According to an analysis of the National Survey of Family Growth, an offshoot of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Americans today are less approving of divorce than they were even just five years ago.
At the same time, it can hardly be argued that such opinions are the result of a trend toward more traditional, conservative values, as Americans expressed more favorable attitudes toward young couples living together before marriage and same-sex marriages. Some have suggested that the changing view of divorce is reflective of Americans acknowledging the seriousness of a marital commitment. More people, it seems, believe that a couple should explore every possibility of resolving their problems before heading to court to dissolve their marriage.
The No-Fault Divorce Process
Divorce Is Not a Competition
A quick Google search of the phrase "winning your divorce" brings up about 21 million results (your result may vary slightly), each offering advice or a step-by-step guide on how to gain an advantage over your spouse as your marriage comes to an end. In the last 50 years or so, we have somehow gone from a society that frowns on divorce to one that welcomes and all but celebrates the battle. Of course, it is certainly understandable that you will experience certain emotions related to the end of your marriage, and that anger and a desire for retribution are often among them. You need to remember, however, that no matter how justified you may feel in the moment, there are no real winners in divorce, and an unnecessarily contentious battle can leave both you and your spouse on the losing end.
Remember the Person You Married
The very fact that you are faced with divorce means that you, at some point, loved your spouse enough to marry him or her. There may be situations in which this is not true, but that is a topic for another day. Now, you may claim that your spouse has changed and that he or she is not the same person you married. Fair enough, but are you the same person he or she married?
How Do Divorcing Parents Benefit From Parent Education?
Anyone entering the post-divorce world is faced with challenges they might have never guessed they would have to face during their lifetime. Divorce takes its toll on everyone, and parents who share children are dealt an entirely different set of challenges, such as learning how to create and maintain a new, healthy lifestyle for the whole family amidst a life-altering separation.
Due to the fact that divorce has such a big effect on children and families, some counties and states provide parent education classes to help prepare them for the transition. Illinois, for example, is a state that requires divorcing parents take such courses. The idea is to help equip the parents with the tools they need to raise their children in a healthy, positive, stress-free environment during and following the split.
The Benefits
As a newly single parent, you might wonder why you are required to take a class on how to be a parent. Do you really need a course on how to raise your child? Try to keep in mind that the state has your child’s best interest at heart. The purpose of parent education programs is to help you and your soon-to-be ex-spouse learn how to relate to and communicate with one another in a way that reduces tension and produces the least amount of conflict possible. The programs aim to inform and empower you so you can be a dependable, stable source of comfort for your child as they experience the loss.
Calculating Your Spousal Support Obligations
When a couple with children gets divorced, there is a presumption that one parent—usually the one with few parental responsibilities—will be expected to pay child support. There is no such presumption in Illinois regarding spousal support, sometimes known as spousal maintenance or alimony. Instead, spousal support is awarded on a case-by-case basis, upon establishment by the court of a spouse’s need. Once the need has been determined and spousal maintenance has been deemed appropriate, the court is then tasked with determining how much the supporting spouse is required to pay and for how long.
Statutory Standards
Prior to 2015, the court was granted full discretion to set the amount and duration of spousal support orders. As one might expect, this led to vast disparities between orders issued by different judges, who were guided by their principles of what seemed fair and constituted meeting a spouse’s needs. Beginning in 2015, however, a new law was enacted that provided a standard calculation formula to be used in the majority of divorce cases in Illinois. The statutory formula will apply in your case if you and your spouse together do not make more than $250,000 per year, and you, as the payor, are not currently supporting children or a spouse from a previous relationship.
Child Support Orders and the 20 Percent Modification Rule
Whether you make or receive court-ordered payments of child support, you probably realize how much your children depend upon compliance with the order. As time goes by, however, an order may become out of sync with your child’s needs or your own financial situation. Fortunately, Illinois law provides several scenarios in which a modification of a child support order may be appropriate.
Substantial Change in Circumstances
Assuming that you pay child support, dramatic changes in your life or the life of your child can, obviously, affect your ability to make payments or the amount of support needed to truly help your child. For example, if you are injured in car accident, you may not be able to work for a time, making compliance with your support nearly impossible. Similarly, if your child is diagnosed with a serious medical condition, he or she may require additional support to help subsidize medical treatment. According to the law, a child support order can be reviewed for modification "upon a showing of a substantial change in circumstances."
Mediation Is Not Always the Best Path
A litigated divorce can be extremely stressful, time-consuming, and, in many cases, rather expensive. As an alternative, many couples are able to reach a reasonable divorce agreement through the process of mediation, meeting with a third party facilitator to work out their differences on the all of the pertinent issues. While it can be a very useful tool, there are certain situations in which mediation may not be appropriate. In these cases, litigation may provide the only option for an equitable divorce settlement.
Potentially Less Accountability
Mediation is, at its core, a negotiation process, which means that the parties often begin at extreme opposite ends of a particular issue and work their way toward compromise somewhere in the middle. Complex divorce cases—especially those involving one or both spouses with high net-worth—typically require complicated evaluations of business interests and real estate holdings. These evaluations may be artificially inflated in a mediated divorce case, with the implication that they are merely a starting point for the negotiation. This can be dangerous if one party lacks the appropriate knowledge to properly challenge the valuation or does not have the opportunity to cross-examine the expert who prepared it.
Cook County Judge Hits Employer With $2.3 Million in Child Support Penalties
In what many are calling the largest ruling of its kind in the state’s history, a judge in Cook County has awarded a Flossmoor woman nearly $2.3 million in penalties payable by her ex-husband’s former employer. The court found that the employer—a Herscher car dealership—should have been withholding child support payments from the man’s paycheck but failed to do so. The dealership tried to claim that the man was an independent contractor and not an employee, but the court disagreed.
Income Withholding Notices
According to the law in Illinois, when a person is required to pay child support, his or her employer must be notified and served with an income withholding notice, unless there is a court-approved alternate agreement between the parties on record. The notice must include the employee’s information and the amount that is to be withheld from each paycheck. Once the employer has received the income withholding notice, it is the employer’s legal responsibility to withhold the correct amount the forward the funds to the State Disbursement Unit so they can be distributed to the parent receiving support. Failure to comply with the notice can leave the employer subject to fines of up to $100 per day.
Before You Hit Send: The Potential Danger of Text Messages
"Merry Christmas"
These two words were the entire contents of the first-ever text message, sent on December 3, 1992, by a 22-year old software engineer. Since that time, text message communication has become a way of life, with upwards of six billion messages exchanged every day in the United States. Text messages are short, simple, and quickly accessible for nearly every American adult, which explains their explosion in popularity. However, the very same characteristics that make text messaging so convenient can also create problems for those involved in legal proceedings, especially proceedings related to divorce or children.
Too Available?
When you are going through a divorce or other matter of family law, you will most likely experience a wide range of emotions. Feelings of anger and betrayal can quickly transform into a sense of hope and new beginnings, then back again in the span of just a few hours. For the most part, you would probably not be inclined to call your soon-to-be ex if you suddenly got mad about something he or she may have done. With a cell phone in your pocket or purse, however, you may be tempted to fire off a quick text message, and that could be a mistake.
Rebutting the Presumption of Parentage
As you are probably aware, a parent’s rights regarding his or her child are dependent upon the establishment of the parent-child relationship under the law. In the vast majority of situations, the process is fairly easy. A child born to a married couple is presumed to be the child of both spouses, while unmarried parents can voluntarily acknowledge their parentage by signing a simple form. Sometimes, however, a person presumed by law to be the child’s parent is not really the parent, and when this happens, the individual should be prepared to take action.
A Realistic Example
Assume that you and your wife are in the beginning stages of the divorce process. Your marriage has been effectively over for months, so you moved out and started gathering the information necessary to file for divorce. Each of you begins casually pursuing new romantic interests, which—although not the best idea—is fairly common in divorce situations. Before your divorce is finalized, your wife lets you know that she has gotten pregnant. Assuming that you are not the biological father, now what?
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