About this blog

I am Daniel Sobel, a family lawyer practicing in Bellingham, Washington. I’ve created this blog to supplement the information available at www.danielsobel.com.  Because so many different types of family law issues can arise, most visitors to the blog will want to use the Categories drop down menu to the left to select posts on the topic in which they are interested.

Thank you for visiting, best wishes in navigating your family law matter by whatever means you decide are right for you, and if you would like to set up a free consultation, I can be reached at (360) 510-7816, or via e-mail at danielsobel@gmail.com

Parenting Plans – How detailed does the parenting plan need to be?

A parenting plan includes a schedule for the time the children will spend with each parent. The law doesn’t require parents going through a divorce or other family law dispute to take a more detailed or less detailed approach to drafting the parenting plan. A parenting plan that calls for one parent to have custody “Every other weekend, plus vacations by agreement in the summer” could describe the basic outline of an agreement, and it could even be entered in those terms in the final parenting plan.

However, there are a number of reasons to work for a parenting plan that includes important details, like who will pick up and who will drop off, what time of day exchanges will take place, how much vacation time is available and how much notice should be given, and etc.

This is in part precisely because the parenting plan doesn’t have to be at the center of your co-parenting arrangements from day to day, week to week, and year to year. If you and the other parent are both fine with an informal and flexible arrangement that works for you and your children re: pickup and drop-off times, or re: summer vacations, then, while that state of agreement is in effect, the parenting plan can sit in its drawer.

A parent tends to take the parenting plan out of the drawer is when there is a lack of agreement with the other parent re: exactly what needs to happen when, and it is in those times that a parenting plan without some specificity written into it can fall short of what is needed. In most cases, a person moving through a divorce or custody transition is better served by a detailed parenting plan, the foundation that a detailed plan provides can help prevent or more effectively resolve controversies as the months and years unfold.

Mediation – What role does mediation usually play in a family law case?

For the large majority of people involved in a contested divorce or other family law situation in Whatcom County a mediation should be expected, and that is a good thing. Mediations can’t solve every problem, but they are one of the most functional tools in the system in terms of resolving disputes efficiently.

A mediation is often where a contested case is resolved. In some cases one or more court hearings take place before the mediation does, and the rulings in those hearings provide some of the framework for what issues are left to mediate. In other cases, a mediation settles most of the issues but not all of them, and negotiations or hearings that take place after the mediation wrap up the case.

One of the important choices involved in handling a divorce, parenting plan controversy or other family law situation is how to mediate, because there are two very different styles of mediation available. I’ll go into detail on both kinds of mediation in other posts, but generally, an evaluative mediation is designed to say what a court might do and suggest to both parties reasons why they might settle along those lines, and a facilitative mediation is designed to clear the way for the parties to hear each other out and design their own agreement.

In some cases, such as the relatively formula-bound situation where a child support question is the only one involved, or in a situation when domestic violence indicate the parties shouldn’t be called on to mediate, a mediation may not be expected to occur.

Family Law Case Plans – How would the $350 flat rate compare to paying for the same work on an hourly basis?

The flat rate advice package I am offering compares very well to buying the same number of hours of legal service on an hourly basis.

I estimate that the flat rate package I’m offering involves four hours of legal work. That’s one hour for the meeting, two hours preparing the advice letter / case plan, and one hour of follow up time. The fixed rate cost of package is $350, roughly half of what would otherwise be paid to receive four hours of a family lawyer’s work and advice.

The cost per hour worked is able to be kept very low on this package specifically because it is a wholly predictable set of  jobs for me to accomplish for the person purchasing the package.

Just as a client can benefit from having a fixed cost known from the outset, I benefit from having a fixed set of tasks I will accomplish known from the outset. Because the limited representation package lends itself so well to being managed smoothly, I feel able to offer this package for the $350 flat fee.

Family Law Case Plans – Low cost but highly personalized assistance from a family lawyer

I still offer full representations in divorces and other family law matters, but I have also added the option of a low cost Family Law Case Plan advice package that I’m finding is a solid fit for a number of situations.

The package costs a flat fee of $350, and includes:

• my review of the client’s intake questionnaire, designed to give me the basic outline of the situation,
• a one hour meeting with the client to make sure the client’s individual perspective and priorities are understood,
• a five page case plan / advice letter that I draft for the client with the information gathered in the two steps above in mind, as well as my experience as a family lawyer,
• one hour of follow up advice, divisible into a number of small segments if that is helpful, to assist the client with issues that may arise as the situation unfolds over time.

I’ll be filling in the considerations surrounding this package in other posts, but wanted to get this overview up on the blog, as I am excited about what this package offers in the way of detailed and personalized guidance to clients who might otherwise not receive help from a family lawyer.

Who gets to stay in the home while we’re divorcing?

In some divorces or separations, the parties agree from the start to the finish of the case on whether what had been the family home will be kept or sold. In the cases where a family home is to be kept, there are, again, cases where there are no controversies on the basic issue of who will live there, when the move-out of the other party will occur, and other related topics. In some cases occupancy of the home is a settled issue from the start because one party is looking to move out of Whatcom county after the divorce. In cases involving children, sometimes both parents agree that the children should stay in the family home, and both parents agree which parent should stay there with them. For these or other reasons, the basic issue of occupancy of a home can often be moved through fairly smoothly.

In the cases where the parties do not agree on occupancy of the home, this can be an important area for the client to seek and be open to the advice of the family lawyer. A party is generally not well served by having the court’s first introduction to the case involve ordering that party out of what had been the family home, and so anticipating the way the law would be applied in the client’s case is important.

A number of considerations enter into analyzing this issue. The question isn’t settled by whose earnings have been paying more of the mortgage, nor even necessarily by one party’s ownership of the home prior to the marriage. The full set of circumstances needs to be analyzed, particularly when children are involved.

Will I, or the other parent, be seeking “full custody” or “joint custody” of our children?

In Washington state, the answer to this question is surprising to many people. The answer is, in a way, no on both counts, because this state’s legal system doesn’t feature the categories of “full custody” and “joint custody”. Instead, a parenting plan is agreed on by the parties or ruled on by the court, and an important part of what that plan does is lay out a schedule for where the child or children will live each day of the year.

It is fair to ask, if one parent is given an overwhelming majority of the time with the children, how is that different from “full custody”? And, considered from that angle, looking at a full custody style result and asking why we don’t just go ahead and call it “full custody”, the answer may appear elusive. The meaning of the shift in language is real though, and it’s more clearly evident when considering the process of establishing a parenting plan in the order it actually unfolds.

That is, the first step is not to decide whether you are seeking full custody or joint custody, and look towards either a supermajority of time or a much more even split accordingly. There is no such formalized dividing line in the Washington case law or court system that you have to come down on one side or the other of.  Instead, you are called on to focus on exactly what type of residential arrangement would work best for the situation in your case, and to fine tune the schedule to work as well as possible.

Some of the practical implications of how de-emphasizing  the idea that one parent is the main parent and one is the defeated sub-parent could play out might include: a consideration of whether, if one parent has the children for the majority of the school year, an extended summer residence with the other parent might work (considering the children’s ages and other factors). Or, the question might in some cases be considered of how much daycare or afternoon time one parent might provide for young children, even on days where the other parent will be the one with evening and overnight time.

In some cases, one parent represents a serious threat, and these cases are treated very differently. But in the usual case, there is an effort by the court to integrate both parents into the children’s lives as much as is appropriate, within the bounds set by the children’s ages, the distance between the two residences, and a number of other factors. It isn’t that cases trend towards 50/50 splits, they do not, but  there is a preference for maximizing healthy ongoing relationships with both parents, and looking for appropriate ways to schedule time to do so.

What kind of parenting plans are created for children of different ages?

Whether through presenting arguments to the court that lead to a workable judge-ordered parenting plan, or through building an agreed parenting plan through negotiation or collaboration with the other party, a primary focus of parents and their lawyers in the family law context is often on ensuring that the new pattern of the children’s lives will be as healthy as possible.

To meet this goal, parenting plans very often need to be tailored to the ages of the children to which they apply. The same divorced or separated parents, even if their priorities, work, and other obligations remain consistent over time, might have a very different plan for arranging time with an infant than they would for a sixteen year old. These two opposite ends of the spectrum, tailoring a parenting plan to the nature of parenting a baby or the nature of parenting a near-adult, are not the only age categories to think about paying close attention to when creating a parenting plan.

The Whatcom County Superior Court system has since 1998 recognized an advisory document with a wealth of specific recommendations on some of the ways parenting plans might be appropriately tailored to the ages of the children involved, the Whatcom County Residential Guidelines.

It is important to realize that the guidelines are not law, and so neither parents crafting an agreement nor a judge crafting a ruling in Whatcom County have to be consistent with these residential guidelines. Even as a source of non-binding information, the guidelines are not effectively applicable to a child without reference to the family’s own unique factors.  These limiting statements, however, are not meant to detract from the usefulness of the document when creating a parenting plan. The residential guidelines are the primary example of a set of printed Whatcom County-specific substantive principles for navigating this crucial aspect of a divorce, separation, or parentage case.

Will I have to pay my ex’s legal fees? / Will my ex have to pay my legal fees?

It is rare that there is not some difference in the financial resources of people going through a divorce. Even where joint accounts at the start of a case lay a partially equal foundation, a higher-earning party may be seen by the courts as having a greater ability to borrow and/or pay out of his or her income as the case develops.

Washington law grants the courts considerable discretion to order the payment of attorney’s fees  from one spouse to the other in a divorce. This is a very significant factor in how some contested divorces play out. However, the trend that I observe is towards awards of fees that, when given, cover only a portion of the legal costs of the spouse with fewer resources.

Part of the explanation for this is that other tools may already be in use to bring about either an equitable or equal financial arrangement during the divorce. Spousal maintenance may be flowing from the higher earning spouse to the lower earning or homemaking spouse. Or, the higher earning spouse may be fixed with the greater share of the debt service during the divorce. In this context, ordering the higher earning spouse to pay the other party’s legal fees may be seen as a third or fourth option, most likely to be used by the court aggressively only when the financial gulf between the two parties is sizeable enough that more than the two or three primary tools are needed to acceptably bridge the gap.

The question rests with the discretion of the judge, so the exact specifics of a given case have to be known and considered to forecast when attorney’s fees will be ordered paid by the party with more resources. But the general principle being suggested is that it is when there is a particularly wide gap between the parties’ ability to pay that the party with fewer resources might most reasonably anticipate having part of his or her legal fees paid by the other party, and the party with more resources might most reasonably plan on that expense.

Supporting your well-being during a family law dispute

Whether you are going through a divorce, revisiting a parenting plan, adjusting child support, or handling another family law issue, you are called on to do far more than choose the right family lawyer for your situation… navigating the process can be facilitated in many ways by your lawyer, but in other important ways the situation calls upon you to depend on yourself and your support network.

Make time for the people that support you: If you have friends, parents, siblings, or others with whom you are close, staying connected with them may be particularly important during this time, whether that has to do with discussing what you are dealing with, or getting your mind off the case from time to time.

Engage in activities that support you: There is no intention here to paint the months you are handling a family law matter as pleasant or easy. It is understood there is stress involved, likely increased demands on your time due to changes in your work or residential schedule, plus the time and energy required to handle the case itself can be considerable. It is because of all of those demands being placed on you that if there is an activity in your life that gives you more energy than it takes, you need to engage in it. For example, if you are a person who gains more energy than you lose by exercising, make sure to make time for that. Or, if your day ends better when you listen to your favorite music than when you watch whatever happens to be on TV, do what supports you. It can be a difficult time, but an important time, to remember that.

Set your expectations for your case carefully: Every case is different, but expecting to move through a family law controversy very quickly and with zero problems is often not realistic. It’s equally true that expecting a family law controversy to be devoid of opportunities for cooperation or settlement tends not to be an accurate reading of the situation. It’s almost always best to both brace yourself, and keep your eyes open for workable resolutions, by seeing a family law case as a situation that will present challenges and opportunities that you and your lawyer can make well-considered efforts to address.

Domestic partnerships FAQ’s: #2. Is advice available on forming a state registered domestic partnership?

I am absolutely available and willing to advise a person considering forming a state registered domestic partnership re: specific questions they have on that topic. I have actually found, however, that questions on that side of the process aren’t tending to come in. I tend to receive inquiries on dissolving, but not on forming, domestic partnerships.

It may be that the generally available information on forming state registered partnerships, including on a website the state has set up, at http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/domesticpartnerships/, is tending in the majority of cases to answer the questions people have about registering a domestic partnership. And of course the occasion of registering a partnership is generally accompanied by far less conflict than the occasion of dissolving one.

Because the domestic partnership questions I receive tend to revolve around separation,  most of my online information on domestic partnerships is primarily focused on the end of the relationship… it’s where I’ve perceived the need to be. But for a person with a question about registering a domestic partnership, the intention of including this post is to signal that, yes, if it is needed, advice on that topic is available.