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Getting your final divorce judgment can feel like crossing a finish line. After months—or sometimes years—of negotiations, paperwork, financial disclosures and difficult decisions, you finally have a signed judgment. Your divorce is officially over. Except there is one more important step: making sure your financial life actually reflects what the judgment says. A divorce judgment can award you an account, a house or a share of a retirement plan. It can assign a debt to your

Nesting sounds like the answer to every parent's worst fear about divorce. Instead of uprooting the kids and shuffling them between two households, the children stay put in the family home, and the parents rotate in and out on a schedule. One parent lives there during their custody time, then packs a bag and moves to a separate apartment, condo, or spare room while the other parent moves in. The house stays constant. The kids never have to pack an overnight bag, forget a favo

If you are beginning to think about divorce, you are probably discovering that there are a surprising number of legal and financial issues to understand — often at a time when you are least equipped emotionally to deal with them. One of those issues is the date of separation. At first glance, this may seem like it should be simple. Was it the day one of you moved out? The day you decided the marriage was over? The day you told your spouse? Or the day someone filed for divorce

Something breaks the moment you find out. Maybe it was a string of texts you weren't supposed to see. Maybe it was a credit card statement with a casino's name on it, or a browser history you wish you'd never opened, or a bank account that was quietly drained over months or years. Whatever the doorway was, once you walk through it, a specific kind of trust is gone — the trust that let you hand over a piece of your vigilance and trust someone else to hold it responsibly. Most

Most people walk into mediation knowing what they want. Almost nobody walks in knowing what happens if they don't get it. That gap — between the outcome you're hoping for and the outcome you'd actually face without an agreement — is where negotiations get lost. It's also exactly what BATNA, WATNA, and MLATNA are built to close. Where These Terms Come From BATNA — Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement — was coined by Roger Fisher and William Ury in Getting to Yes, the boo

To anchor, or not to anchor? When most people hear "anchoring" in a negotiation context, they picture something adversarial: name a number first, plant your flag, force the other side to react to you. That's the textbook version, and while it is not wrong, it is incomplete, and it's not at all what I mean when I talk about anchoring with my clients. There is no "winning" in mediation. The only "win" is mutual when both spouses keep their kids' wellbeing the focus and reach an

If you're in the process of divorce or have been divorced for any length of time, you know the feeling. The notification pops up. You see their name. And before you've even opened the message, your stomach tightens, because some part of you already knows what's coming — another accusation, another dig, another message that seems engineered to pull you into an argument you don't have the energy for. What you do in the next ten minutes can shape the next ten years. That might s

Let’s talk about the words we use, because they are doing real damage. Failed marriage. Broken home. Broken family. Torn apart. These are the phrases that attach themselves to divorce like a second verdict — one that follows people long after the legal proceedings are over, seeping into the way they talk about their own lives, the way they explain their families to strangers, the way they lie awake at three in the morning and wonder what it says about them that their marriage

Imagine booking a flight to a country you've never visited. You don't speak the language. You've never read anything about the local customs. You have no itinerary, no map, no sense of the terrain. You just show up at the airport and hope for the best. No one does that. Even the most spontaneous traveler does some preparation — a few searches, a downloaded map, a rough sense of where they're going and what to expect when they arrive. Because going somewhere unfamiliar without

Interviewing adult children who experienced their parents' divorce in childhood is instructive. What If We Just Asked the Kids? We spend a lot of time theorizing about what children of divorce need, what they feel, what they will carry with them into adulthood. Researchers debate it. Therapists write about it. Parents agonize over it in the quiet hours when the house is still. But what if we simply asked them? That's exactly what sociologist and family therapist Constance Ahr

Financial awareness in marriage is a non-negotiable. There is a version of this conversation that only gets had in a divorce attorney's office, and it breaks my heart every time. A spouse — often a woman, though not always — sits across from me and says some version of the same thing: "I don't really know what we have. He handles all of that." Sometimes it's said with a shrug. Sometimes with shame. And sometimes, after years of financial invisibility, it's said with a dawning

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."— Albert Einstein Divorce is hard. Coparenting after divorce — especially when the relationship ended in conflict — can feel nearly impossible. And yet, the children watching from the sidelines need you to figure it out. While Einstein wasn't thinking about divorce when he said this well-known quote, he might as well have been. Because one of the most painful truths about divorce is this: the s

There is a story that California family law attorneys tell — and have been telling for over two decades — that captures better than any statute the real cost of financial dishonesty in a divorce. We'll get to it. But first, the foundation. Don't be tempted to hide assets in CA divorce. The Disclosure Obligation Is Not Optional California is a community property state. That means assets and debts acquired during marriage generally belong equally to both spouses — and both spo

Please indulge me in this metaphor, as it is so on-point, that I had to share. There is an Eden Climber rose in my garden that has been, for most of its life, simply getting by. I planted it years ago in a spot that seemed reasonable at the time — partial shade, protected from the intensity of Southern California summers. It took root. It leafed out. Every year it put on green, and every year I walked past it and thought, that's doing fine. Except it wasn't blooming. For near

During "California Mediation Week," Let's Look at What to Expect at Every Phase of the Mediation Process Mediators have their own styles, approaches, and personalities. Some are more directive. Some ask a lot of questions. Some favor joint sessions; others work with each spouse separately for much of the process. There is no single "right" way to mediate a divorce. But the bones of the process? Pretty consistent. If you're considering mediation — or you've already decided it

What Is Mediation in California Family Law — And Why Private Mediation Changes Everything This third week of March is California Mediation Week. If you're going through a divorce or separation in California, you've probably heard the word "mediation" a lot. Maybe your attorney mentioned it. Maybe you've seen it in court paperwork. Maybe a well-meaning friend told you it's "the easier way." But what actually is mediation in the family law context — and what's the difference be

Know when to start sleeping in separate rooms This one is uncomfortable to talk about. So, let's talk about it. When a marriage is ending but both parents are still living under the same roof, there is often one boundary that gets avoided longer than others — and it tends to get avoided precisely because it feels so final. So stark. So impossible to walk back once it's done. Sleeping in separate beds. I understand why couples resist it. It feels like a declaration. Like the m

A genuine apology may not save your marriage. But it just might save your family. By the time most couples arrive at mediation, they've been through it — the arguments, the silence, the hurt that piles up over months or years of a marriage falling apart. They come in guarded. Sometimes angry. Often exhausted. And almost always carrying something they've never fully said, or heard. What surprises many of my clients is that one of the most powerful moments in a mediation sess

When people find out you're getting divorced, the advice starts coming fast. "Get a bulldog attorney." "Don't let them walk all over you." "Fight for everything." What most people don't tell you is that how you divorce matters just as much as what you end up with — especially when children are involved. California offers several different paths through divorce, and the one you choose will shape not just the legal outcome, but your co-parenting relationship, your finances, and

What "Amicable Divorce" Actually Looks Like (And Why That's Okay) A client was recently telling me about on-going conflict with his spouse as they neared mediation and said with great disappointment, "I don't think this is going to be amicable." We need to examine what amicable really means in divorce, because I've learned that in divorce, most people define "amicable" in a way that sets them up for failure. They think amicable means: We never disagree We always feel good abo