One of the biggest questions clients have when contemplating a divorce is which spouse is entitled to remain in the marital home during the during the proceedings. For obvious reasons, it is not always ideal to have both spouses remain in the home during a contentious divorce. Deciding who goes and who stays, however, sometimes must be decided by the court through an order granting temporary exclusive use of the marital home to one of the parties.

Whenever a prenuptial agreement is mentioned in popular culture, the parties involved are usually incredibly wealthy. This association—that only the wealthy benefit from prenuptial agreements—is partly to blame for the general public’s lack of knowledge about them. Since most people aren’t incredibly wealthy, they write off prenuptial agreements as something that wouldn’t benefit them; unaware of the potential benefits to average couples; they miss out on the opportunity to save themselves thousands of dollars in future litigation costs should the parties later divorce.

As awareness and understanding of transgendered people and related issues grows, courts are being forced to examine how the “best interest of the child,” the standard used in all custody cases, is applied in cases where the parents disagree about raising their child as a transgendered individual. From hormone replacement therapy to name changes to transformative surgeries, transgendered children are fighting to establish their right to make changes to their identity without both parents’ consent.

Factors that may be considered:

Forensic examinations can be an extremely useful tool employed by the courts to offer the judge a clearer picture of both parent-child relationships, the child’s home life, and other factors that are considered when establishing a custody arrangement.

What are forensics in child custody cases?

For most divorced or otherwise separated parents, visitation is a time for the noncustodial parent to nurture a healthy parent-child relationship. In some cases, however, the court can order that the visits must be supervised by a third-party. Supervised visitation allows the noncustodial parent to maintain a parent-child relationship without subjecting the child to any danger of harm that might otherwise occur if the visits were unsupervised.