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A lawyer specializing in the defense of fathers is a family law lawyer who provides the same line of defense regardless of the case before the family court judge. Namely: the right of fathers and their children to maintain satisfactory relationships.
He is a lawyer who considers that alternating residence, parental equality, co-parenting, are fights for more family justice that deserve to be waged. He is a lawyer who considers that fathers are not second-rate parents and that the interests of children demand that they also be able to live a quality daily life with their father.
It is certain, and it is no secret, that defending fathers before family court judges is much more difficult than defending mothers. The latter in fact obtain very easily the fixing of the residence of the children at home without them having to prove any particular educational capacity. We must therefore show conviction and have a specific approach to best defend the interests of dads. However, the reality is that many family lawyers have no convictions on these issues, or have opposing convictions that they conceal from their clients. Hence sometimes the feeling of clients of not having been defended up to the challenges.
Thus, for example, some lawyers sometimes plead for shared residence, sometimes against it. Often with opposite arguments, depending on whether they are defending the father or the mother. Sometimes, in the same morning and before the same judge! The alternating residence is then praised for a young child, when the lawyer or the lawyer defends a father, then curiously strongly discouraged when the same lawyer or the same lawyer defends this time the mother.
How then to win the conviction of the magistrates, to keep a real credibility towards them, when one has arguments with variable geometry and contradictory from one file to another? Can you imagine that a lawyer specializing in the defense of road victims defends with conviction people who drive while intoxicated or do not respect speed limits? The answer is obviously no.
Worse, some lawyers discourage fathers from requesting shared residence, or simply from taking legal action to assert their rights. This is often nonsense. A father risks nothing by applying for alternating residence. The only thing he risks is being dismissed and especially losing a chance to get it. If there is an adage in the field of fathers’ rights, it is this: only fathers who have “fought” to have an alternating residence or even custody of their child have obtained it.
Choosing a law firm specializing in the defense of fathers means avoiding the risk of being defended by a lawyer who has no conviction in the matter. It means choosing a family law lawyer who does not resign himself to sexist stereotypes and discrimination in order to perpetuate a status quo that is detrimental to children, and to generations of fathers.
Know the pitfalls of hearings, medico-social investigations, or exchanges with the other parent.
A law firm more experienced in defending fathers:
The more a law firm defends fathers, the more it learns about their difficulties and the more it is able to best defend their interests by guiding them towards strategies that have been successful for other fathers in other cases.
This is the point of specialization. It multiplies files of the same type and therefore experience and knowledge. Each folder increases the experience and the next folder will benefit from the experience of the previous one.
To a certain extent, each father is helped by those who preceded him and whom our firm has defended. In turn, this father helps the fathers who come after. Fathers who obtain landmark decisions are laying essential stones or more family justice.
Law firms that work with dads on a regular basis have thus learned over time to better prepare fathers for hearings, to effectively combat “false accusations”, so-called “gender” stereotypes, opinions on residence alternating which are more a matter of “commercial coffee” than of a legal debate, pseudo-theories of psychoanalytical origin on the interests of the child, psychological expert reports or clearly oriented social survey reports.
With a better understanding of the issue of fathers:
Issues related to fatherhood are a place where powerful stereotypes are exercised to the detriment of fathers. This is particularly true when the question arises of determining the residence of the child or children.
Fathers are allegedly less able to take care of their children… Children need their mother more than their father until they are 3 years old, 5 years old, 6 years old… Shared residence is bad for children. .. It is better to preserve the stability of the child than the relationship with his father… It is not the time that a father spends with his child that counts but the quality of this relationship…etc.
All these prejudices, to a certain extent from another age with regard to recent developments in society, have been demolished by dozens of studies . We now have longitudinal studies, having followed tens of thousands of children, all over the world, from their birth until they enter adulthood, to know more precisely where the interest of the ‘child.
But, as surprising as it may seem, many family court judges are ignorant, even of the very existence of these studies. Each time we asked the question to a judge to find out on what basis he supported his reasoning or if he could cite a study going without the sense of the words he held, we got no answer.