(0:00 – 0:21)
Hello everyone, I’m Dr. Michael Mantell with another Family Law Matters. I’m joined with the highly esteemed family law attorney, Bonnie Rabinovitch Mantel, owner and managing partner of the Primus Family Law Group, a firm that is family oriented where experience meets results. Hi Bonnie.
(0:22 – 0:33)
Hi Michael, how are you doing? Doing well, thank you. Bonnie, today we have two interesting questions that have come through. I’ll ask, let me ask you this one.
(0:34 – 1:07)
Someone says that he or she did not want the divorce. The other spouse is filing. The person who feels victimized says, why do I have to pay a lawyer? How do I get my soon to be ex, I refer to as stove ex, soon to be ex, to pay for my lawyer’s fees when I didn’t want this in the first place? Well, first of all, this California is a no fault state.
(1:07 – 1:19)
So the fact that you don’t want the divorce doesn’t really play, that’s just very simple. The second thing is you don’t have to get a lawyer. You can do this by yourself.
(1:20 – 1:46)
Most lawyers, I mean, you know, depending how contentious your divorce is, you can probably do it without a lawyer. However, if you are going to get a lawyer, one of the ways to get your other side to pay for your divorce is if they make more money, but they’re still not gonna be paying for all of your fees. The court is very clear that they want you vested in the process.
(1:46 – 2:11)
If somebody else is paying all your fees, you may be inclined to delay. You may be inclined to make unreasonable requests or run up those fees because you’re not vested in keeping those same fees at a minimum. So yes, if your spouse makes more money than you, then you have a right to request a contribution.
(2:12 – 2:35)
The judge then has judicial discretion to either grant that request or deny it based on how much money you make, what resources you have, yada, yada. So it’s not a slam dunk just because you didn’t want the divorce and you have to have a reasonable basis for the request. You raised an interesting question that I had not actually ever considered before.
(2:37 – 3:05)
Whichever side is paying, if both are paying, what stops this one from stringing it along just to elevate this one’s lawyer fees or vice versa? Well, what’s nice about Primus, we know people play those games. We know firms out there, and we have a select few, that we know that do that on a regular basis. So we don’t play those games.
(3:05 – 3:32)
If there’s unreasonable requests going on, or if there’s just being litigious to be litigious, there is actually a code section in the family law in California that says, if you are not promoting settlement and you are just trying to be litigious, we can get sanctions against you. So we can go out and get sanctions against the other side. Unfortunately, it’s never the attorney.
(3:32 – 3:52)
It’s always then foisted onto the client because the attorney’s acting at the client’s request. And so the client could be ordered to pay sanctions for acting essentially like a bad person. Okay, I appreciate the clarity of your answers, always.
(3:53 – 4:16)
Next question is this. Someone wrote to us and asked, how can I get an annulment rather than go through a whole divorce process? What is an annulment here in California? And how can people go down that path if it’s available to them? Well, an annulment means your marriage was never legally valid in the first place. So it voids out the marriage.
(4:17 – 4:26)
But you have to have very specific bases for doing that. For example, you were forced into marrying the person. There was fraud.
(4:27 – 4:49)
Like the person said that they were one gender, but they were actually a different gender. Or the person said that they wanted children and then you found out they could not have children but knew they could not have children. Like having a vasectomy or having their… Right, they did something to preclude that.
(4:49 – 5:12)
Or if you married a family member and you didn’t, let’s say, know it was so that’s incest without necessarily meaning to do that, you can nullify the marriage on those grounds. You can’t get an annulment just because, unfortunately, your religion precludes a divorce. That won’t allow you to get annulity.
(5:12 – 5:22)
So there are very specific bases. You have very specific timeframes within which you can do it. Very interesting, very interesting.
(5:22 – 5:47)
I’m sure that this comes up more often than we realize when people are surprised after marriage to find out something that they didn’t know beforehand. Is there a time limit that you have? It’s a time limit based on when you found out the fact or that creates the void in the marriage. Got it, I see.
(5:47 – 6:15)
So if you found out something several months after the marriage, you can’t wait three years later, I assume, so… Right. All right, family law is always so interesting and you bring such clarity to it and you bring it down to a level that people can actually understand what it is you’re doing on their behalf. And I’m sure that the appreciation that comes to you and your team members of Promise Family Law is quite palpable, you feel it.
(6:15 – 6:42)
If people wanna be in touch and ask more questions about their own particular cases, how can they be in touch with you? Well, Michael, they can always reach us directly at 619-574-8000. Or if they wanna reach us online, they can reach us at www.PrimusFamilyLaw.com. There’s a form they can fill out and we will reach back out to them. That’s terrific.
(6:42 – 6:59)
And if you folks have any questions that you’d like us to particularly focus on, please write to that email address and we’ll be sure we answer those questions for you. Bonnie, we’ll see you next time at another Primus Family Law Matters edition. Bye, Michael.
(6:59 – 7:00)
Bye-bye.