• Licensed Illinois Attorney: Ten Years of Experience in Family Law
• Member:     Illinois State Bar Association, Family Law Section
• Member:     Illinois DCFS Statewide Adoption Attorney Panel
• Certified to represent children:     Cook County Circuit Court

A husband fled to another state with his young son.  The wife came to me for help, after first hiring another attorney who had filed a case in a different county but had made little progress.   After filing a new case in Cook County, I obtained a court order for the child's return.  The wife (my client) was awarded custody of the boy, and we reached a written agreement on how parenting-time should be shared, and how the husband should pay child support.

A wife filed for divorce and claimed that her husband had to pay her $50,000, based on an Islamic agreement signed at the time of the wedding.  (There were no children.)  The husband came to me for help.  I filed a "motion for declaratory judgment," arguing that the agreement was not a legally-binding "premarital agreement" under Illinois law.  After a hearing, the Court agreed.  The divorce case then quickly settled, with no payments due from Husband to Wife.

A father came to me after the mother of his two young children essentially abducted them.  After asking to take the children with her to another state for a summer vacation, she had announced that she was going to stay there and live with the children.  Fortunately, the father had retained me quickly enough that we could still establish jurisdiction here in Illinois.  I obtained a court order for the immediate return of the children.  The father then took that court order to the other state and showed it to the law-enforcement and court people.  A judge there issued a brief order requiring the mother to turn over the children, and law-enforcement officers accompanied the father to the mother's house to retrieve them.  They escorted father's car to the Interstate highway and he drove the children home to Illinois.   The court here awarded the father the custody of the children.

A husband came to me for help in a divorce case.  He was a very active and involved father, and he wanted equal parenting time with his two teenage children, with each parent paying the children's expenses while on that parent's time.  The wife, represented by attorneys, asked for an award of monthly child-support payments.  The attorneys had a conference with the judge, and both sides made their arguments.  The judge made several recommendations, including that neither parent should pay child support.  The case was settled with a written agreement that gave each parent 50% of the parenting time, with a schedule for holidays and special occasions, and ordered no child-support payments to or from either parent.

A father came to me for help after the mother of his child died, and after the child's grandmother had taken control of the child.  The father's first attorney had not been able to prevent the grandmother from filing a petition for custody.   Also, the grandmother was actively preventing the father from visiting the child.  Along with her custody petition in family court, the grandmother had gone to guardianship court and asked to be appointed as the child's guardian.  First, I obtained an order dismissing the guardianship case.  I then asked the family court to reconsider its decision regarding the grandmother's 'standing' in the case, and the Court ruled that the grandmother had no  right to seek custody at all.   She was not allowed to stay in the case.  At the conclusion of our six-month court battle, the child was handed over to the father, who was granted sole custody.

A wife retained me as her third attorney in her divorce, after two other law firms had gathered and indexed several large boxes of documents but had made little progress against her husband's successful efforts to hide and obscure his income.  I discovered that husband had recently filed years of back tax returns, and  I then went on the offensive, demanding fresh information from him, his employer and the IRS.  The court accepted my numbers for his income.  The result, after five hours of negotiation on the day of trial, was an agreed judgment scheduling $276,000 in maintenance (alimony) payments to the wife over 10 years.

A father came to me after his ex-wife asked the court for permission to move to another state with the couple's teenage daughters and her new husband.   Although the wife had offered several reasons why the move would be good for the children, and she had taken the children on a tour of their "new" area, the father knew that such a move would cause his parenting time to be severely restricted.  We filed a court response and expressed strong objections to the move.  During a court appearance, the judge expressed strong doubt that the move would be approved.  The wife then withdrew her petition to remove the children.

* Every case is different, so there can be no guarantee that you will achieve similar results.  Please call me to discuss your particular situation.