Before I started law school, I was one of two film reviewers for what is now the Philadelphia Weekly. My wife’s and my first date[1] was a Saturday matinee of Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. After moving to Charleston in 1992, I did a film reviews for a few years for the Post & Courier.  I love going to movies, especially with my wife, and especially to early access/sneak preview screenings. When the Citadel Mall IMAX announced an early access screening to director Luca Guadagnino’s latest, Challengers, the bride and I were all in.[2]   A part of ..read more

On March 20, 2024, the South Carolina Court of Appeals refiled its opinion in Gandy v. Gandy, making two minor factual adjustments. The first changed a sentence, “For alimony purposes, Father’s stipulated monthly income was $12,008.67” to “Father’s stipulated monthly income was $14,643.” The second corrected footnote three from “The family court also awarded Mother $5,000 a month in child support to be secured by Father’s life insurance” to “The family court also awarded Mother $2,097 a month in child support to be secured by Father’s life insurance.” These changes did not affect the Court of ..read more

A recent blog I wrote on consulting an individual counselor before consulting a divorce lawyer generated interest in the International Business Times, resulting in a piece, Navigating Marital Challenges: The Case For Individual Counseling Before Divorce, Championed By Gregory Forman. I am in the midst of drafting a blog highlighting two very recent books on marriage.  Perhaps my future includes a sideline as divorce lawyer providing marriage advice? The post Feature in International Business Times on Navigating Marital Challenges first appeared on Gregory S. Forman, P.C ..read more

If more family law attorneys handled appeals they would likely consider using judicial notice during their trials.  Judicial notice can be used to draw the trial judge’s focus on things happening in the courtroom and allow the appellate courts to consider such activity on appeal. Judicial notice, Rule 201, SCRE, is the procedure by which an attorney can ask a trial judge to take notice of a fact which is “not subject to reasonable dispute in that it is either (1) generally known within the territorial jurisdiction of the trial court or (2) capable of accurate and ready determination by re ..read more

As an attorney, I am a “counselor at law.” Some unhappily married folks who sit across my desk, contemplating and discussing the end of their marriage, would be better off seeing a different counselor first. Many of the unhappily married are clearly better off ending their marriage.  A 20-something spouse with no children can end a “starter marriage” with little financial and emotional stress and no future entanglements. Ironically, the recent upswing in “grey divorce” makes sense. A couple who have maintained an unhappy marriage to raise their children to fledgling stage and establish su ..read more

One of the least pleasant tasks in any litigation is responding to discovery. Little of what is produced in responding to discovery actually gets used at trial.  The work of responding is cumbersome, time consuming, and discovery request are frequently overly broad and unduly burdensome.  Especially in the family law context, most of the responding and document gathering requires the client’s active participation, which requires an inexperience person to do for the first time what an attorney has been doing myriad times. However, the fact that most discovery responses provide little ..read more

This is another blog inspired by last Friday’s guardian ad litem training.  As I enter my fourth decade of practice and acknowledge that my legal career is half over (likely two-thirds over), I find myself increasingly agitated by certain trends I perceive in family law.  I want to resist becoming the old man shaking his fists at the youngsters and reminiscing about the “old days,” but there are trends in family law that I think need to be actively resisted.  And the trend towards even more restraining orders is one I find well-meaning but good neither for parents, children, or ..read more

South Carolina’s annual guardian ad litem training, which took place last Friday, always inspires at least a few blogs. It did again this year. During the closing Q&A, a participant asked if any of the guardians on the lecturer panel found it noteworthy when one parent referred to the other parent’s home as “dad’s house” or “mom’s house.” The implication was that such parents did not consider the other parent’s home to also be the child(ren)’s home and that such a viewpoint was potentially noteworthy. Such a concern can only exist within the context of a joint-physical-custody culture.&nbs ..read more

South Carolina updated its child support guidelines on January 15, 2024—for the first time since 2014.  There are three main distinctions between the 2014 and 2024 guidelines. First, the Schedule of Basic Support Obligations now goes up to $40,000 per month in combined income. The 2014 version only went up to $30,000 per month.  Under these new guidelines, fewer cases will fall outside the guidelines due to high income. Second, the Schedule of Basic Support Obligations appears to generally be higher for the same income level—often by 25% or more.  This increase evidently was int ..read more

Every year I do a table of published family law opinions from the prior year.  2023 was a slow year, but not the slowest year since I started this blog. It is the first year to have no family law opinions issue from the Supreme Court.  In fact, there was only one appellate argument in the Supreme Court last year addressing family law. No opinion has issued from that argument yet. Further, no published opinions have issued since the August 30, 2023 decision in Brantley v. Brantley—a published loss which primarily established that I have represented numerous fathers on appeal [but not ..read more