What is Litigation?

Litigation is the process lawyers engage in to prepare and take a case to court (or an arbitrator) for a decision.  The role of the attorney is to build their own case and to find ways to discredit the other side's case. A big part of this is gathering information - obtaining documents, interviewing...
August 15, 2014

Can We Reach Our Own Agreements?

I am often asked whether a couple can reach their own agreements, or whether a Washington State court is going to refuse the accept those agreements and substitute its own decisions. As a general rule, a couple is able to make their own agreements as to things that are just between them. I have neve...
August 8, 2014

What is a Settlement Conference?

Here in King County, and increasingly in other counties as well, parties are required to go through some kind of dispute resolution process prior to trial to see if the case can in fact be settled. The most common type of pre-trial dispute resolution in litigated cases is the settlement conference....
May 9, 2014

What is Imputed Income?

In Washington State, income may be imputed to a parent for purposes of calculating child support if the parent is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed (i.e. does not have actual full time income)....
April 18, 2014

Can I File My Divorce in Washington?

I have had a number of questions lately about filing Washington divorces. The questions have generally been from people not currently residing in Washington, or newly arrived in Washington. Several have even been from people in same sex marriages who have moved to states that do recognize their marr...
March 20, 2014

What If I Can’t Afford A Lawyer?

It is no secret that lawyers are not inexpensive, and divorces are not cheap. While certainly we believe you will be better off with a lawyer on your side, there are some options if you need to keep expenses down....
February 14, 2014

What is an Intimate Committed Relationship?

When an unmarried couple separates and needs legal help with dividing what they have acquired, one question that we need to determine is whether the relationship has amounted to an "Intimate Committed Relationship". To make this determination, the court will look for factors indicating whether the p...
February 7, 2014

What are Temporary Orders?

When a divorce is filed, there is generally a need to determine what the various living arrangements are going to be until the case can get to trial (which in King county can be a year away, and more or less in other counties). In the mean time, the spouses may need answers to questions like: how ar...
December 20, 2013

Is Separate Property Off the Table?

In dividing property in a divorce, the Washington courts distinguish between separate property and community property. Community property refers to assets acquired by the couple during the marriage. Separate property refers to assets acquired by one of the parties outside of the marriage (prior to m...
December 13, 2013

What If I Don’t Know Where My Spouse Is?

Sometimes couples separate without taking any formal action to end their marriage. Then at some point (often years later), one spouse decides they want to be divorced, but no longer knows how to locate the other spouse....
December 6, 2013