Steve was married to Kim for about ten years and they had one child together who was eight years old at the time. Steve and Kim had been separated for most of their marriage. Meanwhile, Steve had entered into a new relationship with Cary, and they had one child who was two years old, but Steve and Cary’s relationship soured and they separated.
Steve came to me needing a divorce and to establish legitimacy of his younger child. We expected that the legitimacy case would be the more difficult of the two cases because he and his wife Kim still had a decent relationship and Kim knew about Cary and the other child.
Steve is a self-employed person and one of the major difficulties of the case was proving his income to the satisfaction of the other side, to work on a settlement. Kim refused to settle and a trial was required to finalize that case, I successfully defended Steve against a barrage of claims and allegations by Kim, and at the end of the day, the terms of the court’s final order were very close and sometimes identical to the proposals of settlement we had previously made to Kim.
With the divorce case resolved by trial and a judicially determine amount of income for Steve as one result, the legitimacy case was resolved by settlement very soon thereafter. Steve spent in excess of $10,000.00 on the divorce case and significantly less, about $2,000.00 on the legitimacy case.
