So, January is the month when New Year’s resolutions are made and broken. And with the wind of fresh starts lifting them up, January is also the month when divorce filings skyrocket. In fact, it’s second only to June, when the kids are out of school and living arrangements can be altered before the start of the next school year.

Typically, parties are prompted to reach out to a divorce attorney in January because either they didn’t want to spoil the family celebrations or were hoping that the holidays would help them reconcile.

Either way, our office sees an influx of calls by new prospective clients who are ready to pull the trigger on their divorce in January and usually a couple of weeks after the New Years, once bills and the return to the routine underscore the same marital problems that existed before the holidays.

Posted by Victor J. Medina -
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, California Divorce & Family Law, and came across this post regarding Dating After Divorce.

I’ll leave it to you to read the post because it’s interesting, but briefly, it tells a story of divorced parents getting back into the dating scene. Coincidentally, the post quotes a story from the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, where I grew up.

It makes me think about my own experience as the child of divorced parents. My parents divorced when I was 2 and both remarried when I was about 5. I can honestly say that I never remember seeing either one of them date until I met the people they eventually married. I’m no psychologist, though I married one, but I have to figure that part of the reason my parent’s divorce was so smooth was because my parent’s kept their divorce, including their dating, to themselves and kept me entirely out of it. Well, as out of it as can be expected given that mom and dad lived in different houses and I saw dad on the weekends, etc.

For what it’s worth, nothing about my parents’ divorce and my experience with it got me interested in family law, except to the extent that I get clients who are serious about collaborative divorce and I hope that their divorce has as little impact on their children as my parents’ did on me.

Posted by Victor J. Medina -
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

The UPI recently ran a story that said that the end of summer is one of the most common times of the year to start divorce proceedings.

Included in the story was this:

The lawyers said the end of summer is rivaled only by the close of the Christmas season for amount of annual divorces, ABC News reported Tuesday.

“This is usually the deferral of a decision that’s been made months earlier,” said James Hennenhoefer, a family law attorney in Vista, Calif.

Our practice has experience similar surges in divorces. The common theme is that couples are waiting for the good times to be over before creating havoc in the home. Although James Hennenhoefer’s suggestion is about the end of summer, it’s typically true that divorces after the close of Christmas are also the deferral of decisions made in the past (usually before the start of the “holiday season”).

Posted by Victor J. Medina
Medina, Martinez & Castroll, LLC

It seems that every weblog starts with a post called “First Post” and I don’t want to jinx the success of this blog by deviating from the standard. Not to mention, this gives me a chance to test the blog. So, here’s “First Post” - this is going to be a great resource for family law, especially in New Jersey.