Lunch & A Divorce Lawyer LIVE with Attorney Peter Olson

THIS MONTH: This month we're 'deconstructing' your divorce and talking the nitty gritty on getting Spousal Support and Legal Fees paid by your spouse. If there's an imbalance in the incomes and property of the parties in a divorce, these are critical issues. Learn IF you're entitled to this money & HOW we can get it for you.

Peter: Hello!

Welcome to 3rd Thursday, Lunch & A Divorce Lawyer.  I'm attorney Peter Olsen, Chicago Family Law Group.  Thanks for joining us.

This month I'm flying solo, back to some exciting guests in the upcoming months.  We have three scheduled to be interviewed recorded, but this month we're doing another ongoing if infrequent episode where we're breaking down a divorce case, to the 5 to 7 basic parts of a case because on the one hand divorce and legal matters generally are pretty complex.  I don't think it needs to be as unclear or sort of a black box as people tend to view it.

So, this month we're talking about spousal support and attorney’s fees.  Those are big issues in cases.  I don't know if you think they're related or they don't sound related to the average person but they are very frequently two sides of the same coin in a case.  I'm gonna deal with them together today. 

What's the quick intro kind of hook?

Well, spousal support and attorney's fees meaning the idea that your spouse either during the case or after the case has to pay you sort of a monthly income, that's what I'm talking about their spousal support.  Legally we call it maintenance.  Then attorney’s fees, the idea that the other spouse, again, either during the case or at the end of the case has to contribute to your attorney's fees; give you a lump sum of money or basically pay your lawyer’s bill some times.

That's what we're talking about here and they're related because attorney’s fees and spousal support are in play when there's an imbalance in income and property between the parties.  If that fact situation is your fact situation, both of these tend to go together.  I feel like in a lot of cases I'm filing for both of these things even in the same pleading, maybe it's like a petition for maintenance and a contribution to attorney's fees because the facts that undergird both of those situations are so common. 

Let me look at a couple hypotheticals that I've sort of drawn up here on my Microsoft Word blank document, and just show you how it works a little bit so you can have a good grasp and understanding how spousal support gets set and how attorney’s fees.  A contribution to attorney's fees by your husband or wife gets handled here.  I'm going to just pull up a little screen share here and we're going to take a look at my little “Made up Family.” 

So, here's my little made up family.  I hope everybody can see that it's okay. We've got Jennifer and Joel Peterson, who have been married for 14 years and Joel is a pilot with United Airlines earning a $140,000, 11,666 per month and Jennifer worked as a stay-at-home mom for eight years, so she wasn't in the workforce for quite some time but now of late works part-time as a teacher's aide earning $25000/year.

This is a very classic spousal support case and that means you have a great imbalance of incomes. I didn't really look at my percentage but quick math, Joel is more than five times what Jennifer earns, so you have a great imbalance here.

Joel's earning enough for spousal support it's going to be appropriate.  I feel like once in a while you'll have a case where there is a great imbalance but if somebody's earning higher income earning something like 30 to or 40 thousand, it's just oftentimes not even likely that that spousal support is going to be in play period just because it's hard for somebody to just support themselves.  I feel like at 30 or 40 thousand dollars a year plus pay spousal support to their ex-husband or wife.

That would be my only caveat.  It's an income and balance situation but then there's also probably a little bit of a higher income earner does need to be at a certain income level.  I would say somewhere maybe 50-60 per year and above before spousal support is really going to be something a court's going to look at.  So, what are we looking at here and let me talk through this a little bit.

This is how maintenance is looked at in Illinois.  We have an amount issue, what's the amount going to be and then what's the duration going to be?  Because those are really the things you're talking about. 

How's it calculated?

Spousal support is a math formula.  It can deviate but for purposes of this quick 20-minute video, I'm not going to go down every little rabbit hole.  Most cases are set with this math formula.  The higher income earner or the payor of maintenance is going to pay.  The math is 33% of Joel's net income in this case.  So, here we go.  I've set Joel's net income that's just his after-tax income 7,727 x 0.33.  That's a third basically of his monthly net income, $2549.

So, that's one part of the math formula.  One-third or 33% of the higher income earner’s net income and then we're just subtracting, we're subtracting 25% of the lower income earner’s net income.  So, Jennifer's 25% is 444, so there we go.  We ended up with $2,105 as being the monthly payment paid to Jennifer, the lower income earner in this case.

Is that pretty clear?  It really is a pretty straightforward math computation in most situations.  That's the picture there in terms of the amount of Jennifer.  What's my fake person Jennifer Peterson is getting $2,105 per month in spousal support.

I'm not going to pull up the law but there are different percentages that the length of the marriage would be multiplied by to get the duration.  The long and the short of it is that any marriage more than 20 years, you're going to be talking about a permanent basically unlimited number of years on spousal support but then anything under 20 years, there are different percentages.  In this case, it's 60% for a person married 14 years.  Under 5 years something like 0.2, there are different little cutoffs by how many years specifically a person has been married.

But what's the duration in our case?  It's a 14-year marriage.  14 years x 0.6 which is what's in the law ends up with 8.45 years of maintenance spousal support. That's the picture in my little hypothetical here in terms of how much and how long will Jennifer Peterson in our case receive child support.  She'll be getting 2105 for 8.5 years. 

I hope that helps you just get a picture on it because if you've been somebody who's been out of the workforce, maybe staying at home with the kids, maybe an illness or disability and now a divorce, this is a lot of money and a big issue to protect yourself on.  $2,105 a month is probably 25,000 additional income per year for 8 years.  That's serious money there, more than 250,000 to 25000 so this is not something to be loosey-goosey with, negotiate a little bit, maybe the monthly you could mess around with but the idea that if you're entitled to spousal support, you need to make sure your attorney is going to get it and we would certainly be able to get that for you.  It is a big-big issue.

Just bridge much more briefly on the issue of attorney’s fees because attorney’s fees are simply – again they're going to apply in cases a lot like the scenario.  Just put it out there with Joel and Jennifer.  With the big things being the income and balance and sometimes just kind of the party's access to assets and property to pay their attorney, oftentimes one part of the couple might sort of control the rate strings so to speak and even if there's some good money sitting around in an account, maybe there's 100 to a couple hundred thousand dollars sitting around, but you know my wife is the one who does all the budgeting.  I need to get a court to order attorney's fees paid. 

Then another thing to think about is sort of even just is there an imbalance of what's being paid to each lawyer because that's really an important issue in the Illinois Family Law.  There needs to be a balancing of the playing fields when it comes to the access to a good lawyer.  Let me just pull up a couple examples for you and just kind of just talk your way through the issue of attorney’s fees. 

I'm going to give you a couple examples from real cases of ours.  This was a case where I think the wife in this case whose name was Raquel earned maybe two-thirds to one-third of William or Willie's income.  So, the court ordered a $1000 attorney fee contribution to Chicago Family Law Group, our Law Firm.  That was the picture in this case.  Like I said it was just making somebody earn about 70 to 75 thousand, somebody earning in the low 30s.

This was another case of ours.  It's an order that's hard to read but in the interim fee contribution of 10 thousand dollars where each party was actually ordered to be paid 5 thousand dollars was ordered.  Again, this was a case where I think one of the spouses earned 75 or 80 and the other one earned maybe 140.  Again, that imbalance of incomes.

Then I think about my last little item and a case right now that's finishing up.  I'm literally going to do something in this case in the next day or two, where one of the parties earns 120 thousand a year and one of them earns 40 thousand and I'm quite confident the court is going to order a $5000 attorney fee award to our client in this case.

That's a little bit of a breakdown for your divorce deconstructed on spousal support and attorney's fees.  I hope you find this helpful and if you're headed down the divorce road and there is a great imbalance in income or access to assets and property, you really need to just be up to speed on what you're entitled to.

I'm going to end it there.  Thank you again for joining us and check us out at www.familylawchicago.com