Manhattan child support lawyers
If you are a non-custodial parent facing child support proceedings in Manhattan, the most important thing for you to do is to hire a skillful and experienced lawyer in this area of legal practice. Our law firm employs attorneys with decades of experience in the New York Family Courts, the competent legal jurisdiction for all child support and custody cases.
With the right legal team, there is a good chance that your case will be able to be resolved with an outcome that you will find satisfactory. If you are the biological non-custodial parent of a child, it is likely that you will end up paying some form of child support. But that amount depends on a large number of factors. An experienced lawyer can help you minimize the amount that you owe and ensure that you are not required to meet financial obligations that will leave you without the means to survive.
Child support proceedings are an extremely serious matter
Every week, we see non-custodial parents, mostly but not exclusively fathers, who find themselves with child support orders that they could not ever hope to reasonably meet. This is almost invariably due to these parents not taking their original child support proceedings seriously.
The truth is that court order for child support is one of the most serious and life-altering judgments that any court passes down. For many non-custodial parents, a child support order will affect them far more profoundly and for far longer than even a lengthy stay in a state prison would.
There are two reasons that, should you find yourself involved in child support proceedings, you should drop everything and focus on achieving the best possible resolution. The first is that court orders regarding child support are legally binding until the child turns 21 years of age. This means that, in the case of an infant, you will be looking at two decades of having the court and its enforcement officers looking over your shoulder, always with the direct threat of jail hanging over your head.
The second reason that you should take child support hearings seriously is that, once the court becomes involved in your case and an order is issued, the debts generated never go away until they are paid in full. One particularly nasty consequence of this is that we see many fathers, whose children are well past the age of 21, who are being sentenced to lengthy jail stays for back child support payments. This is simply due to the fact that these men still owe fees and principal on their child support five or even ten years after their child has reached the age of majority. And they are still being sent to jail for these debts.
For these reasons, it is imperative that you get a competent lawyer on your side as soon as the legal process begins. A good lawyer can help you to negotiate a fair payment that doesn’t leave you without the necessary funds to survive or live a reasonable lifestyle. A good lawyer can also help to uncover any mitigating factors, such as money earned by the custodial parent that may have gone unreported or under-reported throughout the hearing.
Both parents are legally responsible for the financial care of their children. Good counsel can ensure that both parents are equally towing their own weight, not just relying on confiscating the livelihood of the non-custodial parent.
With a skilled lawyer who knows their way around the Family Courts, as if by second nature, you can maximize the chance that your case will be satisfactorily resolved.