The Attorneys at Dixon & Moseley, P.C.
Strong, Trial-Ready Advocates Protecting Your Rights
How to Decide What School Children Will Attend The Public vs. Private Debate Another school year is quickly approaching, if not already started for most children. With the ringing in of the 2012-2013 school year, conversations regarding children’s schooling and where children will attend school come to the forefront in domestic law cases. Where a child will attend school is…
One tool frequently used in a paternity or divorce, or post-paternity or divorce or custody modification, is requesting a custody/parenting time evaluation. An evaluation is helpful for many reasons. Globally, it is a tool used to allow a mental health professional to observe the parent-child relationship from a neutral, third-party position, and evaluate the family dynamic and make recommendations to…
The Bed Bugs Epidemic and What Parents Can Do About It In The Custody Context In the last several years, an old enemy to the American (and individuals and families across the world throughout history) family has re-emerged on epidemic proportions: the lowly bedbug. Any issue that impacts any large segment of our society will ultimately present itself in the…
Ensuring the Children’s Best Interests In many of our previous blog posts, we have explored the determination of a child being CHINS (a Child in Need of Services)1, TPR (Termination of a Parent’s Rights)2, and adoption3. Ultimately, all of these cases that involve where children are placed when the parents have legal issues impacting their ability to parent are governed…
What Is It? What Is Included? How Is It Divided Up? In Indiana, what property, assets, and liabilities the trial court is to divide is commonly referred to as the “marital pot”. In essence, everything the divorcing parties have is poured into a “pot” and the court divides this in a just and equitable manner. Specifically, a central determination to…
As noted in other blogs by , as the dynamics of a family shift, so do the legal issues facing the family. Often, child care and financial support is given by grandparents or other family members if the biological parents are either unable or unwilling to raise their children. Biological parents may place the responsibility in the hands of others…
The process of perfecting an appeal, as discussed in previous blog posts, is often a complex one, with numerous rules and time limitations.1 The general trigger to file an appeal is that the order being appealed is a final order.2 There are, however, exceptions to this final order rule. An interlocutory order is an order of the court that is…
When a case has begun, there is a level of information gathering that must be done before trial. Oftentimes, it is this information that can lead to the information which will allow for a settlement or agreement between the parties or that is the basis for trial. Either way, this information gathering, called discovery, is an opportunity for the attorneys…
An observation attorneys make is the nature, scope and complexity of facts that arise in child custody modification cases are often as diverse as the controlling statutes and case law. Thus, trial courts have wide latitude to decide these matters; subsequent modifications have a tendency to, or perception of, unsettling the child(ren) and are more difficult to accomplish than the…
In the simple to complex legal and factual world constituting domestic litigation, sometimes anything that can go wrong will. Nowhere is this more true–or potentially damaging–than on the eve of trial or on the day of the trial itself. Over the years, I have observed a number of such scenarios play out with litigants and attorneys (even myself) that you…