Contents
Houston Family Law Attorney
A divorce can be devastating emotionally and financially for the parties seeking divorce and their children.
The fact that family law has both federal and state components only makes the process more stressful. You will need a resourceful and experienced Houston family law attorney that can help you with issues such as child custody, division of property, spousal maintenance, debt division and other family law cases. But such a lawyer will be even more useful if your divorce is contested.
Why You Need An Attorney
Your attorney’s main interest is protecting your rights during the often overwhelming divorce process. The attorney can review your case and inform you about how you are likely to fare as far as child custody, finance, and relocation of the child is concerned. This will give you some emotional relief and removes anxiety, because you know that every legal aspect of your case is in capable hands. Do not let cost alone be the deciding factor in your choice of attorney. Consider instead experience, attentiveness to detail, and domain expertise.
Your Child Custody Rights
What sometimes happens in non-agreed divorces is that one partner may try to use the children as a revenge tool against the other partner. But the truth is that both parties involved in a divorce process have legal and physical custody rights over their children. Legal custody rights allow a parent to make decisions on behalf of the child. These include decisions about medical care, education, religion, and more. Physical custody rights are rights for spending quality time with their children while offering love and emotional support.
During and after divorce, there are certain things related to child custody that may change. Both parents can be given joint custody or one parent can be given sole custody of the child. When they have joint custody, both parents share the responsibility for caring for the child. In a situation where one parent has sole custody, it means that that parent has physical or legal custody of the child, while the other parent has visitation rights.
Marital Property Division
Texas is a community property state, which means that you have to agree with your ex on how you will divide marital property, or the judge will do it for you. The judge will use the following factors to determine marital property division:
- The income and earning power of both parties
- Circumstance that led a party in the marriage to seek divorce
- Child custody
- The physical and mental health of each spouse
- The age of the spouses
- Debts of the estate
- Education and employability of the spouses
- Waste of community assets
There are a number of other factors that the court will consider when dividing marital property. There is also the fact that there is separate property, which is property that only belongs to one of the spouses. Separate property is not supposed to be divided when there is a divorce. Your attorney can help you identify your separate property in a divorce process.