An attorney is ethically obligated to maintain privacy in meeting with potential clients. Even if you do not hire an attorney from our office, we would need to keep the contents of our conversation private. This does not mean that your spouse won’t be able to access your email, phone, or other electronic device without your knowledge, however. That means that while an attorney from our office or from another office won’t be able to disclose information to another person about your consultation or meeting your spouse may still be able to find out about it.
Premarital agreements are a great way for many people to plan for marriage. Many people, however, hold the opinion that premarital agreements are for the greedy or wealthy. That is not true. Marital property agreements are great to plan for how you want your marital property to be divided prior to being in a contentious divorce. If you are a person who owns significant property or has a considerable amount of debt liability that you want to shield your spouse from then a premarital agreement may be exactly what you need to prepare for your pending divorce.
You can get married in Texas without ever exchanging marriage vows. This is known as a common law marriage. There are three requirements must simultaneously be in place for you to be in a valid, common-law marriage: 1) you must live together with another person, 2) you must be intended to be married and 3) you must hold yourselves out as being married to the public. If you and your significant other satisfy all these requirements simultaneously then you may be common law married.
The decision to withdraw all the money from your checking or savings account prior to a divorce can have significant effects on your divorce. For one, doing so will almost certainly increase the degree of animosity between you and your spouse at a time when you can ill afford to take on more disagreements and animosity between one another. You may eventually be ordered to return all the money to your account by a family court judge and could suffer penalties for having drained the account in the first place.
If you have a previously ordered child custody schedule that needs to be changed then you may do so by filing a child custody modification. Reasons why modifications are filed include you or your co-parent having a different job which has increased your income, a parent moving out of state or even your child wanting to live full-time with you or your spouse. A material and substantial change would need to be found to have occurred in your circumstances and the change must be in the best interests of your child for the requested modification to be ordered by a family court judge.
