The Probate and Family Court in Massachusetts is underfunded and cannot handle the amount of litigants that seek relief there each year in as timely a manner as everyone would like.  The Court staff are not ignoring cases, but there just aren't enough court staff to handle the demand.  Because of these issues, the wait time for a hearing in most counties has increased significantly. But finally after months and months of waiting your hearing is finally here.  The Judge hears your case and takes the issues under advisement.  And now the waiting begins again.  How long are you expected to wait for an answer from the Judge?  What happens if a decision is never made?  Or, even worse, if the decision was made but never recorded due to some clerical error? In the past, our only option when these issues arose was to check in with the Judge's Lobby and find out if one of the Judge's secretaries could discover the delay.  Of course, this created more w...

In September of 2011, the Alimony Reform Act was signed into law in Massachusetts, and it took effect on March 1, 2012.  We've previously summarized the many changes that this Act brought to Massachusetts Alimony Law: The New Massachusetts Alimony Law in a Nutshell.   As with many new laws, though, it raised as many questions as it answered.   Now that this law has been around for two years we are starting to receive answers to some of those questions from the Appeals Court and SJC. One of these questions was whether temporary alimony orders count against the duration of general term alimony orders which begin only after a final Judgment.  The new alimony law contains duration limits in M.G.L. c. 208 § 49 , which create a presumption that alimony ends at a certain time based on the length of the marriage.  For example a marriage of between 15 and 20 years, could have alimony as long as 80% of the length of the marriage.  For a marriage of 15 years thi...

UPDATE: There is pending legislation for major changes to the alimony statute in Massachusetts. The Alimony Reform Act of 2011 was filed on January 18, 2011 and you can learn more about the Act at MassAlimonyFormula.com or in our recent blog post highlighting the differences between the bill and the current law . In March of 2010 Attorney Justin Kelsey of Kelsey & Trask, P.C. was contacted by the NYS Law Revision Commission because of his involvement in co-authoring the Divorce Spousal Support Calculator . The NYS Law Revision Commission was asked by a member of the New York State Assembly to investigate how other states were addressing the issue of alimony formulas. Attorney Kelsey discussed the issues at length during a telephone conversation with the executive director of the Commission and expressed his opinion (as described in a past blog post ) that a formula at least has the advantage of treating everyone the same and offering consistency to the treatment of alimony by...