Happy Independence Day! As we celebrate the birth of the United States, we thought we’d take a moment to acknowledge a few of the Founding Families . . . because family law issues are hardly new. Doubt it? Consider this – Benjamin Franklin was an up-and-coming printer/scientist and polymorph of the first order when he met Deborah Read in Philadelphia in 1723. He was smitten but the draw of living in London Read More
How We Came Up With Our NBC30 Divorce Myths . . .
Meghan and Kristen were on NBC30 last month - several times, in fact - to review the [many] myths around divorce. They chose five. What went into coming up with those five? How do you prepare for a seven-eight minute TV spot? Especially since it's LIVE? Well, Meghan and Kristen prepared by talking to the Freed Marcroft staff and then putting together a sort of running note pad commentary that laid out the Read More
Talking The NFL Draft, Defense, and a Boring Super Bowl
The NFL draft is tonight, something we'd normally be little concerned with but for this: it's expected that this is going to be a big year for drafting defensive players early. Very early. And often. And, we're all about defense. Let's step back for a moment. A little over two months ago the Patriots won a Super Bowl that was not exactly readily accepted into the pantheon of greatest sports events. Why? Because Read More
Happy 2019 . . . Now About Alimony
Meghan was on WTIC radio to talk about this: The new tax code that takes effect this year changes the way alimony is treated for tax purposes. As you can see from the flow chart (left) released by the IRS, alimony will . . . . . . okay, that's the quadratic equation from Algebra II days past. The IRS hasn't released a flow chart, there's not much need for them to do so, the change is, on surface, simple: the Read More
War Games and Winning the Holidays
The holidays are here. Sometimes they seem to sneak up on you, sometimes they don’t so much sneak as lunge. Like this year. We recently responded to a media request for some thoughts about divorce and the holidays. The question was actually unambiguous: “what do you tell parents who are in the process of or are already divorced and ‘can't stand each other' about how to handle the holidays?” We mulled that over Read More
Tough Conversations and The Blind Side
A few weeks ago I did a Webinar with a special guest, Dr. Dori Gatter, from our Hartford offices. It was about the ‘tough conversations’ in life. Sometimes in life the talk you're most afraid of is the one you most need to have. It was a great talk for me, it hit home, as it always does, because the lawyers at Freed Marcroft not only have to encourage our clients to engage in tough conversations with their Read More
Big, Scary Decisions. Big, Empowered Life.
I made a very exciting but scary decision. And you should too. About one year ago, I made a really exciting, but pretty scary decision to change my employment. Granted, I was leaving my work as a family lawyer at a general practice firm to begin work here at Freed Marcroft, also a family law firm, so it wasn’t an entirely new career, but a pretty big change, nonetheless. I was comfortable with my Read More
It’s Hurricane Season, Let’s Talk about ‘Staying’
I ran across an article last week when Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the Carolinas about hurricanes and ‘evacuations.’ The title was somewhat provocative, which is probably what caught my eye: Why Some People Never Evacuate During a Hurricane, According to a Psychologist It led with a quote by a Rutgers psychology professor, Cara Cuite, “There’s a certain population that’s never going to Read More
The Moon Shot, Bob & Ray, and Communication
We need to talk about communication. We're lawyers. it's what we do every waking moment. We need to effectively communicate with our clients, we need to communicate what we've learned to our staff, we need to communicate with lawyers on the 'other side', we need to communicate with the court. A failure to communicate at any stage in a legal matter has the exact same effect a failure at any stage on the Apollo 11 Read More
From Tolstoy to Nina Simone
A Few Thoughts About the Freed Marcroft Process I just came back from three days of intensive business seminars exploring ways for us to run Freed Marcroft as efficiently and client-friendly as possible. The theme for the long weekend was . . . freedom. At 9:13 on a blistering hot Saturday morning in Orlando, I started thinking about freedom and our clients and how we move through the family law process Read More
