Michigan Family Law: An Insider's Map of the Minefield

By Veronica J. White

Veronica J. White, an attorney licensed in Michigan in 2004, is just a regular person with a law degree and only became an attorney because she had negative experiences with attorneys and the legal system when trying to get through her own divorce with significant co-parenting issues. She has experience with divorces, domestic violence, and parenting time problems, so she decided to help other people out there who might be like her. She just wanted to feel understood in her case and understand the process. Seventeen years later, this is the information she believes people caught up in the Michigan family law system want to know. Being in the system feels like fearing for the next mine in the field that could blow up your case and can be stressful and confusing. Understanding the lay of the family law land can hopefully be helpful in reducing this stress and confusion.

Veronica wrote an article for a local newspaper over the course of 2003–2012 and won a third-place award from the Michigan Press Award in 2007 (Good perspective—seems to be the “person who lives down the street” persona).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662462269

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Michigan Family Law: An Insider's Map of the Minefield

Veronica J. White

Copyright © 2021 Veronica J. White

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-6225-2 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-6226-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Finding Your Family Law Attorney

How to Keep Your Attorney

Expect the Unexpected—Family Law Judges

Friend of the Court

Mediators

Parenting Coordinators

Guardians ad Litem

Different Counties, Different Procedures

Custody

Parenting Time

If Your Child Doesn’t Want to See You

Significant Others, Stepparents, and Third Parties

Domestic Violence

Child Support

Does It Matter If a Relationship or Marriage Ended Because of Fault?

Spousal Support—aka Spousal Support

Evidence

Hearings and Trials

Believing Right Is Wrong Will Get You Nowhere

In memory of Alexis Chandler Dane Childress, without whom this book would not be possible.

Disclaimer

This book is only geared toward Michigan family law. I am only licensed in Michigan, and should a reader reside in or have their case located in a different state, please contact a family law attorney in that given state for legal advice. States vary by both law and procedures, and so trying to use this book to assist in your own case out of state is not intended.

This book is intended to give you the landscape of a family law case (excepting property and debt in a divorce case) without giving legal advice as to a reader’s specific case issues. No two cases are exactly alike, so seek out legal advice with the knowledge you will hopefully garner from this book to guide the way.

Laws change. Though most of this is practical advice, be sure to tell your family law attorney what you want and inquire as to whether it’s still available under the law.

There are not case-specific references based on my own cases in this book. There are only generalities picked up from having over approximately 675 cases and my own general opinions garnered from this experience.

Introduction

I have been practicing family law since June of 2004. I’m just a regular person with a law degree. I only became an attorney because I had negative experiences with attorneys and the legal system when trying to get through my own divorce with significant co-parenting issues. I have personal experience with divorces, domestic violence, and children, so I decided to help other women out there who might be like me. I just wanted to feel understood and understand the process. I could only get that by doing it myself.

It’s hard to find an attorney who understands the three-level chess game that is domestic violence. It’s hard to find an attorney who has been on welfare who can relate to those in a financially difficult position. It’s hard to find an attorney for those with complicated situations who you can connect with. Period.

I also started representing men and have dealt with women on the other side of cases who have been the primary problem. I’ve practiced in at least twenty counties in Michigan. I’ve had well over 675 clients.

This book is intended to help people without a law degree understand how numerous topics in Michigan family law works, so should your happily ever after end in a family law case, you will hopefully have a better feel for the landscape that comprises it. It tells you how to find your own family law attorney, with or without domestic violence. This case could even help you be a better family law client. It’s about what you should do and shouldn’t do inside and outside of court while your case is pending. It’s also about the problems with the family law court system, family law attorneys, mediators, parenting coordinators, guardians ad litem, and the Friend of the Court. It also discusses custody, parenting time, child support, and alimony. It does not include debt and property division in a divorce as that adds several what-ifs that are simply too broad to cover in this book.

I add my own commentary for you to consider when making parenting decisions that can affect how often you’re in court. Additionally, I occasionally add my own personal two cents based on my years of experience both as a divorced parent with children and as a divorce attorney with extensive experience. These are my personal opinions and each reader can take what they want and leave the rest. This book is for the common person in Michigan just trying to make it through the system in a family law case and make some sense of it. I have tried to make this as concise as possible so as to not bog down readers with extraneous information that they won’t usually utilize in order to make decisions in regard to their case.

If you are looking for a list of positions I’ve held with the State Bar of Michigan groups, head of this, head of that, titles, etc., it’s not here. I’ve been too busy in the trenches of family law to set aside time to jump through social hoops for titles for a résumé I don’t need. As far as I’m concerned, busy attorneys are busy because they know what they are doing, and referrals flow in because of it. Clients don’t ask which law school I went to or what titles I’ve held. They just want me to be able to do my job and not let them feel alone in their fight. This book was written late nights during the COVID-19 lockdown. I would not have been able to write it wasting time impressing others over the years in lieu of actively practicing law and a lot of it.

Chapter 1

Finding Your Family Law Attorney

A common question is this: Do I need an attorney? It makes sense to ask that question as there are self-help documents and family law forms available in courts, on court websites, and on the Internet. It’s understandable that people may be tempted to try and save some money by representing themselves. Let me say outright that if there are children, real property, business, alimony, and/or retirement accounts involved in a divorce, you should have an attorney. If you are an unmarried parent and custody and parenting time are an issue, you should have an attorney. It can be very difficult to fix what you may screw up without one. If you sign final documents that become court orders, you may spend more money to fix your errors than it would cost to just do it right the first time. Plus there are no guarantees that you can fix those errors after they are made.

You cannot modify a previous custody order just because there are some problems with it. It is difficult to change these orders, and these can be hard-fought wars. Dealing with custody and parenting time is not black-and-white—it’s all gray. Laws can be messy, and it doesn’t help when appeals courts modify how laws are applied under the umbrella of judicial interpretation. Even child support, which should just be inserting numbers into a formula and coming out with a monthly support obligation, can be complicated. What if a person isn’t working? Does their income count as zero in calculating child support when they intentionally don’t work to manipulate their child support? How do you pay for your uninsured health care expenses? What about the health insurance premiums that you pay? Do those payments count? It can be difficult and intimidating to try and get your legal questions answered in order to adequately represent yourself.

Determining property and debt in a divorce can be tricky. If one spouse isn’t working or isn’t earning as much as the other spouse, how is the debt divided? How about student loans? What if a degree was earned during the marriage? How much should alimony be, and how long should you get it? How do you get a qualified domestic relations order done so retirement accounts can be divided? What the heck is a qualified domestic relations order anyway? What if your spouse cheated, and that caused the end of your marriage? When does that count in divorce proceedings, or does it count at all? What if one spouse wants to keep the house? What if one spouse has debt the other spouse didn’t even know about? What about the property that was purchased before the marriage? What if it’s the house that was purchased before the marriage, and now you’ve both been living in it for ten years after the marriage? These are just a few of the questions that can come up that need to be answered by an attorney. In family law, there aren’t many answers that will be a simple yes or no. There’s always an evaluation of a set of facts with an application of the law; plus, a judge will usually have a number of legal options to choose from in making a decision. Family law practice constitute acts of mental gymnastics. A family law attorney can help you with the numerous decisions that must be made to get you through it. An attorney can also help guide you in terms of written documents, hearings, and orders that are entered with the court.

As to costs, attorneys can be and usually are expensive. They usually range between $200 and $375 per hour in my area of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and require retainers from $1,000 to $5,000, depending on the services needed. What is a retainer? It’s money you are prepaying for the attorney fees and costs. A common question is this: How much is my case going to cost? Even if an attorney is able to estimate a potential cost range, it truly cannot be accurately predicted when a case starts for several reasons, which include the number of issues that arise that cannot be known at the beginning of a case and the time required in order to deal with the personalities affecting the issues. These personalities may be the client’s, the other attorney’s, the other party’s, the judge’s, or third party’s such as Friend of the Court employees, mediators, arbitrators, and/or guardians ad litems.

There are some attorneys that will charge a flat fee for an uncontested divorce. This means that you and your spouse are not arguing over anything and have an agreement as to final terms. However, should an argument break out with the other party, a flat-fee attorney will most likely charge an additional fee to cover the additional proceedings necessitated by the argument. I don’t offer flat fee divorces because I don’t want to constantly evaluate whether an argument has reached a level where I have to request additional fees and potentially place myself at odds with my client as to why the argument takes the additional time. Clients tend to underestimate the time it takes to deal with arguments that erupt between the parties while in divorce or other family law proceedings. And then when asked for more fees after they thought that they had a flat-fee arrangement, they may lose trust in their attorney and feel cheated. I have found it best to simply avoid that type of arrangement altogether.

Some attorneys require small up-front fees and costs (under $1,000) and then fly by the seat of their pants and hope they get paid as they go. If that’s all you can afford, it’s better than nothing. These are not attorneys that are necessarily going to go to trial on your case for small payments here and there, but on occasion, it happens.

Many attorneys accept credit cards if you are short on cash. Many people don’t have access to $5,000 in a bank account to pay their attorney. Credit cards can come in handy when you have legal proceedings and