McCormack Family Law | Top Divorce Lawyer | Child Custody & Support

How to rescue endangered children? Get Children’s Services involved? Those overtaxed wheels turn slowly. There’s a better answer. A private action in abuse, neglect and dependency in Juvenile Court, asking for an order for immediate temporary custody, brings fast action.

What do you have to do to get a divorce or a dissolution of marriage in Ohio? Just two things: live in Ohio for six months and in one Ohio county for 90 days. That’s it. But if your spouse lives in another state where you have marital assets, there is likely to be a question of jurisdiction.

Now and then, it happens that a perfectly written DRO, qualified by the plan administrator and thus turned into a QDRO… is wrong. That can happen when the divorce decree allocation of assets and the QDRO are at odds.

Now that the difference between DROs and QDROs is clear, we can look at a common problem that comes up with Domestic Relations Orders: getting them qualified. I’ll start with the moral of this episode: make sure the DRO is pre-qualified.

When it comes to pensions and divorce, there’s a lot of confusion about how a private pension is divided. Once upon a time, it was virtually impossible for a court to divide the interest in a private pension between two parties. Why? Because of the way the law was written.

In 2000, the United States Supreme Court decided that parents’ interest in ‘the care, custody, and control of their children… is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests.’ But a question remains: Can anything override that right? Yes, in some cases.

The actual time at which a pension benefit is divided and how that benefit is valued depend on what kind of pension you have. Most private and public pensions are one of two types— defined benefit or defined contribution.

When does a spouse get a share of the pension? As a rule of thumb, assets acquired during a marriage are divided evenly. In most cases, the court first determines what portion of the total pension benefits was earned during the marriage.

Are disability benefits considered marital assets? Many people assume that they are and will thus be counted in the division of marital property. It’s not quite that simple.

Many single fathers think that they have an automatic right to spend as much time with their child as the mother does. As a rule, Ohio courts disagree. That makes many unmarried fathers think the courts are biased in favor of mothers. Not so.