Being a successful family law attorney means building a rapport with your current clients and engaging in brand messaging that shows prospective clients that it will be easy to communicate with you. Today’s consumers, including the clients of law firms, live in a world so saturated with advertising that they know when they are being pandered to. Just look at any hate-filled social media feed, and you will see how few points businesses score with performative actions aimed at attracting customers from historically marginalized groups. Slapping a rainbow flag on your law firm’s website will not gain you the trust of LGBTQ couples who have been together for many years before the law recognized their marriages, nor with those who are so young that they cannot remember a time when the mainstream media considered same-sex romantic relationships unspeakable. Instead, the success of family law attorneys with LGBTQ+ clients rests on the same foundations as their success with any other clients, namely knowledge of the relevant laws and effective communication with clients.
What if the LGBTQ Couple Owned Property Together Before the Court Recognized Their Marriage?
Each state has its own laws about the division of marital property in divorce; most are equitable distribution states, where judges decide on a case-by-case basis the fairest way to divide the couple’s marital property, but 10 states out west are community property states, where the court divides marital property evenly in half. In every state, though, marital property only includes the assets the couple acquired during the marriage. Many same-sex couples who have been together since before 2015 jointly own property that the law does not recognize as marital. This can make things more complicated in the divorce case, especially if the parties did not sign a prenup or any other legal agreement regarding the property. As a lawyer representing one of the spouses, you cannot rewrite history. You can only deal with the situation in front of you and help your client get his or her fair share of marital property.
Establishing Legal Parenthood When the Children are Genetically Related to Only One Spouse
In every state, a child can have no more than two legal parents, no matter how many adults are closely involved in the child’s daily care. Regardless of whether the parents have ever been legally married to each other, both legal parents have the right to a court-ordered parenting plan that guarantees each parent a certain number of days during the year with the children. You can only get court-ordered parenting time if you are the child’s legal parent.
If the children are genetically related to only one parent, or if they are genetically related to neither parent, the only way for the genetically unrelated parent to establish a right to court-ordered parenting time is to adopt the child legally. If your client has not legally adopted the children he or she has raised since birth, there is nothing you can do to get court-ordered parenting time for your client unless your client legally adopts the children. The best you can advise your client to do is to delay the divorce until the adoption becomes final.
When Your Client’s Values Clash With Those of His or Her Former Spouse
Differences in sexual orientation sometimes contribute to the breakdown of marriages between heterosexual couples. For example, perhaps your client was honest with his wife before they got married about his feelings of attraction to men, and they both agreed to move forward with the marriage, but it eventually became an insurmountable obstacle in their relationship. If your client and his wife have minor children together, the court must issue a parenting plan; both parents have the right to a fair share of parenting time.
Agreeing to disagree on certain matters is a component of most co-parenting relationships, and no one said it was easy. Your client still has the right to a relationship with his children, even if his ex-wife blames him for the divorce. She cannot persuade the court to order your client not to have a romantic relationship with a man until after the children grow up. The court will only order your client not to allow his partner to interact with the children if there is a compelling reason that it is unsafe for the children to be around the partner, such as if he has a history of domestic violence or driving under the influence of alcohol.
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