Now the divorce is no fault and the lawsuit comes afterwards for the child support which doesn’t even have to go to the child.
>>Now the divorce is no fault and the lawsuit comes afterwards for the child support which doesn’t even have to go to the child.<<
Sadly, there is still spousal support. The original idea was to keep women who stayed at home for their entire lives from becoming destitute.
Of course, it became perverted by a legal system dedicated to cutting men’s gonads off.
In California, the “rule of thumb” is 40% of the difference in the net for 1/2 the length of the marriage (either party can be the higher wage earner and thus the payee). But that is only for marriages < 10 years. After that it is whatever the judge (guess the most frequent gender) decides is “fair.”
No fault (”Dissolution of Marriage”) merely removed the requirement of a specific harm done to the marriage which did not inhibit the divorce but rather assigned weight to spousal support (the “wronged” party ended up with substantial legal presumptions).
How do I know all this? When my lawyer told me to BOHICA, I fired his A and spent months in the law library teaching myself family law.
I represented myself in pro per and filed motions that ended up with the ex asking for the easiest way out.
What was funny was that on a personal level her lawyer and I got along great: he had my sense of humor and I could tell he despised my ex almost as much as me.
Since we settled after I filed a killer motion under the “rebuttable presumption of decreased need” under then Cal 4801.5(c) dealing with meretricious relationships (she was living with some guy), there wasn’t a conflict of interest.
Yes Virginia, there is an alimony.