My approach to child custody and parenting time – it really varies on the type of case what the fact pattern is that I’m being engaged to help somebody with. Child custody, the basics in Minnesota is that a court makes its decision on child custody based on 11 best interest factors. I’m not going to go into the details of that, but that’s something that I’m constantly aware of because the court is looking at what’s in the best interest of the child. It’s not about what’s in the best interest of the parent. In fact, if a parent is too pushy for soul legal custody, or soul physical custody and they don’t appear to support the relationship of the children with the other party or the other parent that will reflect poorly on them – both in mediation or in a trial for child custody.

So, my approach is generally to educate the clients. I have a lot of discussion with the clients about how child custody works in Minnesota and then I put that in the context of what’s happening in their case. If one of the parents is not letting my client see the children, which happens quite a bit then I approach child custody in a more aggressive litigious manner that will use the court system to get an order for that parent to be able to see the child or children regularly. If there’s already more of a relaxed attitude and the parents seem to be able to exchange the children without any conflict, if they’ve already separated and they already have sort of an ad hoc or de facto parenting time arrangement in place then I take a different approach. I discuss what’s happening on the ground and then I will tailor my approach to more of a mediation solution where we’re sitting in a room talking together, with an experienced mediator who might be a social worker, might be another attorney.

In the case of children, you’ll often see a man and a woman team. One being a social worker, one being an attorney and we’ll sit around and the parents each get to talk about what they think parenting time is gonna look like in the future and why that’s best for the kids. And that always works out. If we’re at that stage generally we can get an agreement on custody and parenting time without having a trial.