The ADHD Attorney

Posted By TheAttorney on February 18, 2010

I just finished a year-long custody battle.  Custody battles are the most difficult of all the types of cases that I handle.  They are not to be taken lightly.  In fact, I received a phone call from a potential new client yesterday who said she wanted to try to get custody of her kids back, and after hearing the facts of her situation, I could confidently tell her that at this time, she did not stand a chance.

In the case I recently finished, the judge made an interesting comment to me after we had a chamber’s conference, when I requested to see her one more time after opposing counsel and I were unable to resolve a minor issue.  She said, “You always come back for one more thing!”

I was a little confused.  I have only had this judge in maybe 3 or 4 cases.  In one of those cases, another custody case, I remember opposing counsel and I had a chamber’s conference and the judge gave us her tentative on all  of the issues and then opposing counsel and I went out in the hall to talk.

(Chambers Conferences:  A chambers conference helps us avoid going to trial.  The attorneys go into the judge’s chambers (or the judge’s office back behind the courtroom) where the attorneys are able to candidly discuss the aspects of the case and make an “offer of proof” (state what the evidence is that they would introduce at trial), and then the judge gives a tentative ruling, which is an indication to the parties that, if they put on trial the evidence that was presented in the chamber’s conference, that tentative ruling would become the permanent order.  Sometimes, the judges don’t hear what you are hoping they heard and their tentative doesn’t jibe with what you know the evidence to be.  So that is when it is a good idea and put the trial on, after, of course, discussing the costs v. benefits with the client.)

At that last case, after the chamber’s conference, the opposing party refused to go along with the tentative.  Rather than argue with opposing counsel, I said, “Let’s just go ask the judge.” 

I think the judge must have thought that it was me who wanted to keep arguing for “one more thing” rather than opposing counsel, because I was the one who kept asking to come back and talk to the judge.  What I probably should have done is told opposing counsel to set it for trial rather than keep arguing or asking the judge to continuing mediating.  I made it appear that I was the problem, rather than the one who was seeking the court’s intervention. 

Back to the most recent case, my client did not get what we set out to accomplish, but the results were not exactly negative.  The kids were benefitted in the end, and I believe happier, than they had been at the outset. 

The standard for change of custody is “best interests of the child.”  Sometimes parents think that it is important for the parent to benefit from having a relationship with the child, but it is actually the child whose interest is at the bottom of whether a parent should have custody and/or visitation with the child. 

When a parent applies for a change in custody, if it is not in the best interests of the child, it ain’t going to happen.  In this recent case, it almost might have happened according to minor’s counsel, but then he recommended counseling for the kids and a change in parenting practices to the custodial parent.  Because the children benefitted from both, minor’s counsel recommended that the children stay with the custodial parent.

So there was no “win” for my client, unless you count the facts that the custodial parent has changed his parenting style, and the children had some counseling, and are now happier.  I would say this was a “win” but I am sure my client doesn’t see it that way.

Category: Legal Stories, Miscellaneous | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By TheAttorney on January 21, 2010

The holidays flew by.  I took about 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Year’s to play on the boat, for which I paid the price when I came back to the office the first week of January.  Not only did I have lots of paperwork to get caught up, but I was facing 2 (small) trials, 2 hearings, 1 ex parte, several client meetings and 7 depositions.

I don’t know how we managed to schedule so many events in one week, because the following two weeks, there were no hearings calendared.  All we had scheduled were a few client appointments.

So starting off the new year, the office is quite busy.  I wrote a short time back that I had hired a paralegal who actually knows what she’s doing in the family law area.  She has taken over most of the work on those cases, leaving me free to work on the various pleadings that an attorney must draft.

The office has taken on a life of its own.  When I ran it  by myself, years ago, I handled everything.  It was so small, I could handle the phone calls, document preparation, filing, meetings, court, billing, etc.

Then the Captain came along when it was starting to become too much for me to handle and he took over the phones, advertisement, the internet, all IT functions, scheduling, and billing.  There were actually two viable positions in the office being filled.

Now we have the paralegal here, and she has taken over on basic case management and drafts the simpler documents, meets with clients in order to go over information or gather new information, and she handles a lot of the phone calls.

My job is now just drafting bigger documents, going to court, and meeting with new clients.  I still have to take a phone call here and there.  There are three positions here in the office now being filled.  I don’t want to even think about having to go back to doing everything the paralegal now does.  I was so swamped, and some things fell through the cracks.

We will probably be adding immigration to the list of things we do around here.  The paralegal has a strong immigration background so we are going to take advantage of that and expand the practice.  I am foreseeing that by the end of the year, we may have to hire someone to help the paralegal.

Category: Legal Stories, Miscellaneous | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By TheAttorney on December 13, 2009

I think I unintentionally irritated a judge at a hearing the other day.

A client retained me to help him establish a guardianship over a minor.  We went to a hearing about a month ago and the commissioner at that hearing said we needed to use “due diligence” to try to locate the paternal and maternal grandparents of the minor in order to give them notice of the hearing.  If we couldn’t locate the grandparents, then we would have to file a Declaration of Due Diligence stating the (unsuccessful) steps we took to try to find them.

In a guardianship matter, you must give notice to relatives to the second degree up, which would be the parents and grandparents.  It’s a sad kind of case, really.  I think you also have to give notice to siblings, but I haven’t had a case where siblings were involved.  In this case, the child’s parents are both in prison.  We were able to give the parents notice, but we haven’t been able to locate the grandparents on either side (although we did find a great-grandparent, but that doesn’t count).

I went to court last week to file the Declaration re: Due Diligence, but the line was so long that I decided to leave.  I decided it would be more time-effective to have them filed by an attorney service.

And then I forgot about them.

The reason that this becomes important is because in probate court, you have to file supplemental documents at least 5 days before the hearing so that the court can review the documents in advance of the hearing to determine if all the steps are being followed.  The commissioners and judges and probate attorneys that work in the probate department are extremely careful, I have learned.  You absolutely must dot all your I’s and cross all your T’s.

When the judge called my case, I explained that I made a mistake in not filing my declaration of due diligence and very politely asked if the court could possibly put us on second call in order to allow the court time to review the untimely declaration and possibly see if we were in compliance so that we wouldn’t have to have the matter continued.

The court agreed to review the documents and put me on “second call” (which means that the judge will finish calling all the cases on calendar and then call my case again).  I felt really good about this.

Another attorney had once told me that if there was ever a time that I didn’t submit something at least 5 days before a hearing, to just ask the court if it would review the document anyways.  So I went and had a cup of coffee, I filed a document in another case with the family law clerk, and then I went back to the probate court to get the good news.

When the judge called my case again (two hours later), he said he was going to require me to use more “due diligence” in locating the grandparents on both sides because my declaration was untimely.

“What exactly does the court want me to do that I didn’t do in my Declaration?” I asked.

I don’t think the judge liked the way I asked the question because suddenly the judge seemed like he was mad at me.

“You were untimely in filing your paperwork.  You came into court on the day of the hearing, expecting us to read your declaration, when it should have been filed at least 5 days before this hearing,”  the judge said.  This wasn’t going the way I thought it was going to go.  Maybe the other attorney was wrong about how he had told me it would go.

I tried to rephrase my question.

“I don’t mean to irritate the court, and I understand that my documents should have been filed a week ago.  I just want to know for sure what I should do because I feel like we took the steps we should have taken to locate the grandparents.”  Didn’t I already tell the court that I didn’t file the declaration timely?  Didn’t I already apologize?  Why was the judge chastising me in front of my client?

Also, the grandparents have really common surnames.  I won’t give the real names, but imagine if it were “Rodriguez” or “Brown.”  Those are really common last names.  I just wanted to get a head’s up on what the court wanted me to do other than what I had already done.

The judge sort of repeated himself.  I think he thought I was being belligerent.  I wasn’t trying to be.  I don’t think I was asking the right questions, or maybe I sounded annoyed, which I wasn’t.

Sometimes I think, when I feel like I have annoyed a judge, which I don’t think I do too often, that I should explain that I have Asperger’s and that I say what I think.  I don’t word things properly.  But then I would have to explain Asperger’s.  (It took my husband some time to get used to the way I say things.)

And this is actually why I get along so well practicing law.  In regular life, if I say what I am thinking to people, it somehow comes out all wrong.  I don’t mean to come off strong, harsh, or abrupt, but I frequently sound that way.

In law, saying what you think is actually a good idea, unless I think someone is an asshole, and then that could only get me into trouble.

But the facts are the facts, and in law, it’s usually a good idea to state what you think about the facts, even if it might upset someone.  Such as, “You can’t take all the money out of the bank account, even if you think it’s yours.  It’s community property money because it was earned during the marriage.”

If you were just a friend, and the friend said he or she was going to take all the money out of the bank account because he or she is going through a divorce, you might not say anything about it at all because they might get mad at you.

In the practice of law, you can say things like that because you are the attorney.

But when you talk to a judge, you can’t just say what you think because you can possibly sound like you are being pissy, which is not what I was trying to sound like.  The judge probably thought I was irritated, which I wasn’t.

See, I wasn’t sure if he actually read the declaration about what steps I took and wanted me to take further steps, or if he was rejecting my declaration as being untimely and therefore hadn’t reached the issue of whether we had used due diligence.

So I was trying to ask him if I needed to take further steps or was I just supposed to re-file the Declaration.  Outside the court, I asked my client if he thought I irritated the judge and my client said, “Well, for a minute there you sounded like you were challenging him.”

That is not what I was trying to do, but I know that’s how it was interpreted.  (What’s interesting is that although the judge didn’t clarify further, I ended up doing further research on one of the grandparents and in fact located him.)

Sorry, your Honor.

Category: Legal Stories, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »
Tags: ADHD, Asperger's

Posted By TheAttorney on December 11, 2009

A new movement helps hone unique traits of disorder into valuable skills

Category: Asperger's News, Miscellaneous | No Comments »
Tags: Article

Posted By TheAttorney on December 10, 2009

My mom wasn’t a very good mom.  And no, there are no “good” memories that I can focus on that would outweigh the bad memories.  Unfortunately, the bad memories are pretty significant.

My mom was abusive and self-centered.  Not only did she beat her daughters, she once said to me, in defense of having stayed with my dad after it was discovered that he was abusing his daughters in his own way, “How could I leave your father?  I would have had 5 kids to support!”  Later, she denied ever having said that.

I decided to forgive her after I had gone through years of counseling.  I decided to let the past go and just simply have a relationship with her.

But then I recently found out that she lied about a current situation in which another child was possibly being molested.  I decided that I could no longer have any kind of relationship with her.  It was one thing to forgive her for what she had allowed to happen to me years ago.  It was quite another to forgive her for allowing what might be another of the same type of offense against a different child.  I didn’t really like her anyways.  She has a lot of issues that I had chosen to ignore for the sake of harmony.  When the new situation arose, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that I would just simply stop associating with her.

Which brings me to my current situation.

My “ex” mother-in-law died the other night.  I have never had anyone close to me die before.  I didn’t think about how I was supposed to feel.  I didn’t really think about it at first.

I hadn’t seen my ex-mother-in-law very often since her son and I divorced back in 2001.  And not seeing her seemed to come with the territory of getting a divorce.  She was like separate property that had been assigned to my ex-husband.

For the 13-years that her son and I were married before the divorce, I saw her a lot.  She was more like a mother to me than my own mother.  She came over to our home all the time and helped me with the kids.  She bought me pajamas.  She was there at the doctor’s office when I found out that my youngest child was a boy via ultrasound.  This would be my (then) husband’s first son after 3 daughters.

And she was a Lady.  She never swore.  She never criticized.  She was never judgmental.  She kept quiet when she disagreed with something.

So after the divorce, I didn’t really think about it that I wouldn’t get to see her very often.  Again, it was part of the divorce.

Fast forward to about a week ago, when I found out that she was dying.  I was sad to hear that, but it wasn’t unexpected.  My ex-husband had been telling me about her health for the last year, about the onset of dementia, about how she was eventually moved to a hospice care home, and how she was having trouble recognizing family.  This was part of life, albeit the dying part.

And then a few days later, when he told me that she died, I was saddened by the news, and I cried a little, but dying is part of life, right?  And she wasn’t my mom.  She was my ex-husband’s separate property.

But then on the day of the funeral, the morning found me in an edgy mood.  The Captain noticed that I was unusually grouchy, and then later, that I seemed depressed.  I had no explanation for why I was feeling the way I was feeling.  But as the day wore on, it seemed that the feelings that I had never had to experience before had finally caught up with me.  Someone I had once cared about had died.

I spent the day alternating between tears and working on cases.  I went to bed early, unable to focus on anything else anyways.  And the next day, I had a sense of unreality.  It was like watching the world through a video camera.  There was an empty space in my world.  I had heard about those empty spaces before.  I had just never had an empty space present itself in my world before now.

She had been like a mother to me.  And without realizing it during all those times that she and I kept company, I was being mentored by someone who was showing me how to be a mother, a grandmother, and a friend.  Something I never learned from my own mother.

And so now I come to a place in life where I am learning for the first time how to lose someone I loved.  I feel so very fortunate that I had a “mother” after all, and that I have lived this long without having had to experience losing someone I cared about.  But I don’t like the empty space.

And I now have to take my own advice:  The empty space will eventually be edged out by new acquaintances and new experiences.  But the memory of my “mother” will always be there to keep me company, when I need it.

Category: Miscellaneous, Personal stories | 2 Comments »
Tags: Sad Times