Local Divorce Lawyers Chicago

Local Divorce Lawyers Chicago

If your marriage is ending, there is plenty for you to deal with, and it’s not uncommon to feel completely overwhelmed by the difficulties you face. Fortunately, there are experienced local divorce lawyers in Chicago who can help. 

Addressing the Basics

While your divorce won’t involve the same details as anyone else’s, it will address all of the divorce basics that apply to your situation (just like everyone else’s divorce does). These basics under Illinois law include:

• Parental responsibilities and parenting time and decision making, which come together in an allocation judgment (formerly called legal and physical custody)
• The division of marital assets and marital debts
• Child support 
• Spousal maintenance (or alimony)

Those terms that you and your spouse are able to agree upon will be decided between yourselves with the professional legal counsel of your respective divorce attorneys. If, however, any terms remain after exhausting all of your negotiation options, the court will need to intervene on your behalf.  

Your Parental Rights

When it comes to your parental rights, you need to address your parental responsibilities, which refers to making the big-picture decisions on behalf of your children, including:

• Decisions about where your children go to school
• Decisions about your children and their medical care
• Decisions about your children’s extracurricular activities
• Decisions about your children’s religious upbringing

Often both parents share parental responsibilities, but they can also be assigned to one parent alone. 

Parenting time relates to the schedule that guides visitation time with your children. Sometimes, the children live primarily with one parent and have a visitation schedule with the other, but both parents can also share their parenting time evenly (or nearly evenly). 

Child support is the state’s system for helping to ensure that the financial responsibility for supporting shared children is balanced between both parents. Child support is calculated according to exacting guidelines. As such, the higher earner generally pays child support to the other parent, but it is entirely dependent on the new income shares model which takes into consideration the income of each party and the parenting time allocated to each parent.  

Your Financial Rights

The division of your marital assets is likely to play a primary role in your financial future, which makes getting it right paramount. In the State of Illinois, marital assets – those assets that you and your spouse accumulate while married – are intended to be divided equitably (or fairly given the circumstances) in the event of a divorce. This division is often one of the most complicated and emotionally fraught divorce factors. 

Maintenance, formerly known as alimony, when deemed appropriate, can also play a major role in your financial future. Maintenance is generally ordered only when one spouse takes a disproportionate financial hit in the divorce, and the other spouse has the means to help. 

Turn to Experienced Local Divorce Lawyers in Chicago

The consequences of your divorce will reverberate throughout your future in profound ways, which makes working with an accomplished divorce lawyer key. The dedicated local divorce lawyers at WARD FAMILY LAW in Chicago have an impressive range of experience successfully guiding divorce cases like yours toward beneficial resolutions. We’re on your side, so please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information about how we can help you today.