January is a popular month to file for divorce.  Why?  For many people, the new year is a time that they reevaluate their lives and decide to make changes.  Perhaps they have waited or tried to make a marriage work for some time and the new year seems like a good opportunity to go ahead and pursue divorce.  Others may want to wait until after Christmas to plan for their a divorce. Some people postpone divorce into the new year for economic or tax reasons.  Whatever the basis, if you have decided to divorce in 2017, should you file?

Over the past few months on this blog, I’ve covered many of the issues that we consider in mediation when a couple is planning to file for divorce.  My posts in this series have examined everything from how to divide marital property, how to calculate child support, and how to make schedules for holidays for the children.  Along with resources such as the free forms from the West Virginia Supreme Court, these posts may help you decide whether or not you want to retain a lawyer, reach an agreement before you select a lawyer or file for divorce, or if you want to consider collaborative law.

In today’s post, I’ll continue to share ideas on how to develop a custodial schedule in your parenting plan.  Once you have the decision-making portion of the parenting plan developed, have agreed on some of the objectives and conceptual details about custodial time, you might stumble when creating a calendar, due to unique problems in your family.  In this post, we’ll address some of the challenges I’ve seen parentings struggle with and how they’ve resolved them.

With your decision-making parenting plan in one hand and the answers to some important questions about jobs and schedules in the other, you are ready to start marking up a calendar to decide how to divide custodial time.  You might want to print out some calendars and mark them up with different schedules.  Printed calendars make it easier to evaluate the possible plans.

When you are working in mediation or collaborative law, you can create most any schedule you want to create to suit your families' needs.  

The schedules I’m describing in this post are examples of what has worked for some families. Of course, if you cannot develop a plan through mediation, negotiation, or collaborative processes, you will be stuck with a schedule that a judge creates that may or may not be as tailored to your families’ needs.  

Last week we looked at how to create a parenting plan to divide your decision making after divorce. Establishing details and processes for decision making is the foundation of a terrific parenting plan.   Create a plan with the help of an experienced mediator, family counselor, or collaborative attorney to draft a strong agreement-- built to withstand a lot of wear of tear!  Next, you’ll develop the second part of your parenting plan, a schedule outlining what nights your child is sleeping at each house—or “allocation of custodial responsibility.” 

Between mediations, court appearances and the Virginia Mediation Mini-Conferences, I missed writing my monthly post on how to get a divorce without a lawyer.   I’m back and this week is National Crime Victim’s Rights Week. All of my posts during April will focus on crime victims. Today, I’m addressing whether or not you can get a divorce without a lawyer when you, or your child, are a victim of crime and the offender is the other parent, or a stepparent.  

In the last few months, I've been working on a series on how to file for divorce without a lawyer in West Virginia.  Next week, I'll continue in that series with a post on the hearing.  However, I'll pause today and remind readers of some of the mistakes you can make when filing for divorce without a lawyer.

Welcome to the next post in this series on filing for divorce without a lawyer in West Virginia. Since I practice in West Virginia, Virginia and the District of Columbia, the instructions for each jurisdiction are described in separate blog posts.

If you have followed these posts, you may have taken the first steps and decided that you can file for divorce. You and your spouse went to mediation and now have a written parenting plan and property settlement agreement. What’s next? How do you get to court?

An important step in filing for divorce without a lawyer, is working to reach the agreement before you file.  An agreement can provide greater security and can expedite the process.  Agreements can be reached between the parties informally, through mediation and through collaborative divorce.