There’s a certain kind of legal headline that makes you blink twice and gasp in disbelief, such as one that Missouri just served.
Until recently, women in the state could find themselves in a surreal kind of marital limbo: pregnant but no longer in love with their spouse, ready to move forward legally, and yet still unable to finalize a divorce because a judge wanted the baby to arrive first.
When a celebrity divorce is declared “settled,” the headlines tend to land with the satisfying snap of a closing briefcase. But family law, unlike gossip columns, rarely works in neat finales.
The divorce of David Geffen and his much younger estranged husband, David Armstrong (also known as Donovan Michaels), offers the perfect reminder that a settlement is often less the ending than the beginning of a new legal and personal chapter.
If family law had a category called “things we wish were obviously not lawsuits,” the following case would be near the top.
A recent televised courtroom case (that was also posted on YouTube) featured a father suing his son for $6,000 after the young man left a conversion therapy program the father had paid for.
Divorce doesn’t just divide homes, finances, and schedules. It quietly divides closets, too. Somewhere between splitting assets and signing paperwork, you find yourself staring at a wardrobe that suddenly stirs emotions because it’s filled with clothes that remind you of your former marriage, whether it be the dress from your anniversary trip or the suit your ex loved.
We took a short break from reviewing All’s Fair not because the drama fizzled out but because actual legal work got in the way. But now we’re back, diving into episode 3, and it’s the same old shenanigans in which legal realism takes a backseat to revenge plots, high-fashion lawyering, and one surprisingly accurate issue involving frozen embryos.
For family lawyers, divorce is serious business. For stand-up comedians, it’s a rich source of comedy. Where a lawyer sees paperwork, negotiations, and legal consequences, a comedian sees a tight five-minute set. Sit through any routine built around “divorce is funny,” and you’ll hear some of the most uncomfortable truths about relationships turned into punchlines.
When it comes to divorce and co-parenting, you can get as creative as you want (but not so creative that you game the system). One creative approach involves “nesting.” In this arrangement, the children aren’t the ones moving between two homes; it’s the parents who alternate staying in the family house.
A $10,000 engagement ring shouldn’t be the thing that unravels a relationship. But that’s exactly what happened in one Reddit story that went viral.
The story: a man refused to spend $10,000 on an engagement ring because he believed the money would be better used toward a home.
A viral video clip has reignited a heated debate about the legality of giving up one’s airplane seat. This is not a case we normally take on, but we just can’t resist.
The burning legal question today is this: if the parents of a child who’s crying their heart out ask you to surrender your window seat, are you legally required to do so? The woman at the center of the widely circulated video — the proud occupant of the much-coveted seat — believes the answer is no.
As divorce attorneys who make a living helping couples officially call it quits, we feel uniquely qualified to say this: weddings are the ultimate celebration of love. After all, without weddings, there would be no marriages — and without marriages, well…our paperwork would look very different.