Starting A Business

What Are Cohabitation Agreements And Are They Useful?

Choosing to move in with your significant other is a big step, even if you’re not married. Problems can pop up, and it’s important to protect yourself against them, even if you don’t think they will arise. Speaking to lawyers can help you ensure that all your bases are covered, but I will run through one important document in this article – the cohabitation agreement.

What is a cohabitation agreement?

Cohabitation agreements are legal documents that protect both couple members from unnecessary legal and financial complications if their relationship breaks down. Without an agreement, a broken de facto relationship can become messy to the point where it’s often treated like a divorce.

Fortunately, cohabitation agreements allow couples to live together in much the same way as married couples without many complications. They let couples apply for mortgages, get joint bank accounts, and make important life decisions together without too much risk.

In many ways, a cohabitation agreement is like a prenuptial agreement, allowing each member of the couple to protect their assets and their finances.

Divorce and Insurance

Insurance Policies and Divorce & What You Need to Know

One topic couples often forget according to Davies & Co Lawyers is when making the decision to end a marriage are the insurance policies they owned or purchased during the marriage.  In the upheaval of a divorce, child custody issues, choosing a family lawyer and property division, it’s important to remember these important assets.  Each party should look carefully at the cash value of the policies and who are designated as beneficiaries.

What type of policies should you be looking for?

Health and Life Insurance:  The most important are life and health insurance because they are the policies most commonly involved in child support and alimony orders from the court.

Disability:  A close second in importance is disability insurance, although it’s less commonly a part of a divorce order.

Homeowners:  Homeowners (sometimes known as “hazard” or “liability”) insurance, as well as renter’s insurance, is important to account for because it safeguards the parties residences which are often the major assets in a divorce.

Automobile:  Finally, auto insurance is not only required by every state but also important to maintain as vehicles also become important in a division of assets.

A few definitions may also help when reading a policy:

Insured Party: this is the person whose life or property is the subject of an insurance policy.

Policy Owner: this is the person who owns the policy, and not necessarily the insured party.  An example might be parents who own a life insurance policy on a child.  The policy owner is the parent and the child is the insured.

Divorce Proceedings

Stressed over Divorce Proceedings?

Seek Assistance from Experienced lawyers

Divorce can be difficult to cope with both emotionally and financially and this is especially true if your partner was the dominant one who organised and handled everything in general. As top family lawyers Robertson Hayles suggest, opting for legal guidance can help you feel confident and empowered in the traumatic consequences of divorce. Each divorce is associated with its own unique challenges and some of the most common ones include financial settlements, custody of children, parenting orders, custody of pets and settlement of property.

It is probably a good idea to invest in affordable legal services to help resolve your problems instead of haggling over a few dollars here and there. In many cases, divorce tends to affect women more than men as career takes second place for many after marriage. Even when you get back to work after a few years, you may have missed many important career opportunities. Therefore, women often tend to be secondary bread winners. However, even if you have been in control of your career and finances, divorce proceedings prove to be expensive and whittle away at your hard-earned savings and monies.

Partnership Agreement

Potential Legal Implications with Partnership Agreements?

Water-Tight Contracts can help protect you from Unexpected Litigation

Written agreements are crucial to the success and future of every type of business. Regardless of whether it’s a local business or a large international corporation, legal business contracts can help enforce court action. Commercial lawyers like Rowe Bristol are trained to help a broad spectrum of clients with formulation of tracts, negotiation and protection from litigation. Seeking legal advice can help ensure that the commercial agreement covers every potential situation and challenge. Whether it’s a one-page agreement or a complex contract involving several pages, corporate lawyers can help formulate agreements that are clear-cut, purposeful and comprehensive.

Commercial lawyers offer a wide range of services that involve protecting their clients from exposure to risk. Some common services offered include:

  • Offering professional guidance with regard to business agreements covering agency, franchise , distribution, hire purchase or lease, vendor-business agreements and purchase/sale of goods and services and so on
Cost of Divorce

Reduce the Costs of a Divorce

Experienced family lawyers can help make the emotionally and financially draining process of divorce easier on you and your loved ones. Divorce is granted on different grounds including adultery, abuse, cruelty and so on and may also be granted on a ‘no fault’ basis. However, Australian courts may often require the spouses to live apart for a specific period before the marriage is legally dissolved. A reliable divorce lawyer proves useful while determining if your partner is at fault by examining the circumstances of the divorce. If the fault is proved, you may be entitled to higher levels of spousal support.

In certain cases, the marriage may not have been legally recorded, or the spouses may have overlooked important details. In such cases, the divorce lawyer will help you understand if annulling or voiding the marriage is a simpler solution than applying for a divorce. It’s helpful to discuss these aspects with your lawyer as you can gain insights into the best options available to you. Divorce proceedings are often driven by irrational behaviour, unreasonable demands and poor communication which makes it an expensive and lengthy process. You lawyer can help you understand the pros and cons of decisions by explaining important issues. This could include child custody, spousal support, division of shared assets and so on. You will be in a position to make rational decisions based on mutual convenience for short and long term.

Family Law Act

Legal Complexities and Problems of Part VII of the Family Law Act

Part VII of the Family Law Act provides that it is impossible for a child to have more than two parents. Both the Commonwealth and State laws do not contain specific clarifications on the issue in question. To that end, it is essential to explore how the judges approach this problem. Specifically speaking, the court in Groth & Banks ascertained that the fact that a child has two parents who are his or her biological progenitors permeates the language of the Act.[1]

The primacy of biology in the ascertainment of who is a child’s parents has been displaced for many years by reason of various State and Commonwealth laws reacting to the challenges of artificial reproductive technology. However, it is also pointed out that the language of Part VII provides an insufficient recognition of the realities of certain modern families. Possible complexities and questionable matters may arise in cases where children are born from an assisted conception procedure. The issue of whether it is in the best interests of the child to spend time with a person is separate from the legal recognition of that individual as a parent.

Criminal Offence

2 Elements of Criminal Offence

The advice of criminal lawyers should be sought in any case where a serious offence has been committed. Even if the crime was not a serious one, having a lawyer to advise you will ensure the best result can be obtained. Most lawyers will tell you there are two elements to any criminal offence.

Prohibited conduct. This includes such things as robbing a bank, murder, assault and so on. Most people understand that there are certain types of conduct that will cause harm to others and that are against the law. Anyone who performs such conduct must be punished. If you do get charged with assault or another serious crime, you will need an experienced lawyer/ However, that brings us to the second element.

The mental element of a guilty mind or intention to commit the offence. The same offence, criminal lawyers say can be committed by a person without the intention and they can get off without punishment. For instance, if you struck someone accidentally, you would not be guilty of assault because the element of intention to strike was not there. Furthermore, if you acted in self defence, that would give you a lawful excuse for the action so you may not be charged, or punished, even if you did hit them.

Surrogacy-Law

Surrogacy and Parentage Under the Family Law Act

Surrogacy and parentage constitute two facets of Australia’s Family Law Act that require additional clarification, interpretation or possible reconsideration. To start with, specific sections of the Family Law Act are proposed to regulate various matters related to surrogacy and recognition, such as the recognition of parental status stemming from the use of surrogacy, etc. However, the wording of the statutory provisions does not always make it clear whether a certain part of the Act has application to a particular surrogacy related matter. In this connection, it is often vital to have recourse to case law.

The conventional definition of surrogacy under Australian case law is that it is an arrangement whereby a woman, the surrogate mother, consents to bear a child for another individual or couple. There is a wide range of legal forms of surrogacy under Australian law. Thus, ‘genetic’ or ‘partial’ surrogacy pertains to the engagement of the surrogate mother’s egg and the intended father’s sperm. On the other hand, ‘gestational’ or ‘full’ surrogacy means agreements whereby the surrogate mother does not provide her own genetic material for the purpose of conception.

Estate Plan

Getting Your First Estate Plan Set Up

Estate plans are often used in place of wills, as they provide a more flexible and comprehensive arrangement when it comes to dealing with your assets after your death. Many people don’t realise how important and beneficial estate plans can be, and therefore simply ignore them. However, setting up an estate plan could be a good idea for you and your family. Speak to an estate planning lawyer today to find out how you can set up your first estate plan.

Step 1: Find Help

The first thing to do when it comes to estate planning is to find help from an estate planning lawyer. This will allow you to easily navigate all of the complexities and intricacies of drafting your first estate plan. A good legal professional will make sure that you don’t leave out important information, and will help you develop a plan which benefits your family as much as possible.

Step 2: Draft Your Plan

Drafting your first estate plan is probably the most difficult step, and it needs to be done with the help of an estate planning or wills  lawyer. High quality estate plans will cover every aspect of your life, and will closely detail what happens to your assets after you die.

Protective Order

Two Ugly Words: Protective Order

One of the most common requests among family lawyers is the demand a protective order.  The reasons are as diverse and colourful as you can imagine.  Often, a spouse wants to retaliate against the other after being served with papers.  Sometimes, papers aren’t even filed yet, and a spouse discovers infidelity, financial problems, etc.  The critical thing to remember is that just because you want one doesn’t mean a court will grant a protective order.

Some Housekeeping Items:

There are many different flavours of ‘restraining’ or ‘protective’ orders, and it’s important to distinguish between them because each has different requirements and consequences, and you don’t want to argue for something you don’t want or need.

Let’s focus on the most common type of divorce order: Emergency Protective Orders.  This is a legal document that protects a victim of abuse who is also in a close relationship to the abuser.  Who can get a protective order?  Jurisdictions vary, but in general, you must satisfy the following requirements: