Updates, Events & Useful Tips Surrounding Family Law Issues
Just before Christmas last year, Congress passed and the President signed a major tax reform package that contained a surprising wrinkle. It abandoned a decades long provision that permitted payors of alimony or spousal support to deduct their payments from income and required recipients to report the payments and pay tax on them.
The effective…
On June 19, 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in an Opinion that could be described as unanimous, ruled that the trial court was correct when it decided that it could deviate from presumptive minimum guidelines in a high-end child support case. The case has been floating about for quite some time. We wrote about the…
We have still not seen a copy of the Senate bill although PBS Newshour reports that the final version adopted by the Senate was not circulated in the Senate until late Friday evening and about 5 hours before the vote. However, it appears that the Senate bill does not change existing alimony rules. As noted…
Any American with a pulse knows that 2017 was to be the first overhaul of U.S. Tax Law since 1986. Until this week, what was circulating through Washington was an 18 page executive summary. That changed yesterday when the House Republican Tax Policy Committee circulated a draft bill that specified exactly what changes were being…
The September 7 issue of TIME Magazine features our obsession with childhood sports. The statistics tell the story. In 2005, school age children played sports at a combined cost of about $8 billion per annum. Today that number is about $15 billion, almost double. And, during this same period there was no increase in the…
Not terribly exciting but evidence rulings are hard to find and ones where a family law ruling is reversed based on evidence used by the trial judge are especially rare.
Johnson v. Johnson 2016 Pa. Super. 294 is a published panel decision where the issue was whether Father needed to continue to support an adult…
We live in a day when reported (i.e. precedential) decisions are rare and decisions touching upon important philosophical differences are like hen’s teeth. But on November 18 the planets aligned to give us Hanrahan v. Bakker, a 2-1 panel decision with Judges Ford Elliott and Dubow in the majority and Jenkins in dissent. The…
I was researching material for this blog when courtesy of some “cookie” embedded in a website, I was treated to an opportunity to save substantially on my divorce legal fees by signing on for a service that offered me “al a carte” divorce services by law firms standing by to help me without the “unnecessary”…
There are times when two conversations with two wholly separate individuals causes a person to distill some interesting new thoughts. Earlier this month I had lunch with a woman who has long run the intake program for the Domestic Relations Office in Chester County. We were discussing the triumphs and tragedies associated with the daily…
We have written before about the subject of when and how a person can be in “contempt” of a court order. The word itself is riddled with often misunderstood meaning. What could be worse than having a court decide that you are contemptible?
In the past week I have been called to court to prosecute…
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