Practice Profile
Family
When familial or spousal relationships come apart, individuals are faced with their own pain, as well as the tasks of determining their financial needs and obligations and dividing their property.
The Family Law Group at Cassels Brock is dedicated to easing this transition by ensuring their clients’ interests are protected. We recognize that each situation is different, and tailor our advice and representation to a client’s unique situation.
At Cassels Brock, we are aggressive and combative when required, but recognize when a situation requires a negotiated, mediated or arbitrated result. Flexibility, finesse, imagination and creativity may be as likely to get the needed results.
As part of our service, we regularly speak to groups on family law issues, including their rights, obligations and exposures in:
- Custody and child support
- Common-law marriages custody support and property division
- Variance of separation agreements due to changes in financial circumstances
- Valuing, structuring and division of family assets, including stock options, pensions and family-owned businesses
- Tax issues and corporate structuring in property settlements
- Estate planning
- Mobility rights when moving children outside the jurisdiction
Our Services:
While we act for both husbands and wives, we have developed a niche as advocates for fathers’ rights in spousal support, child custody and child support cases. We recognize that men are often required to pay exorbitant amounts of spousal and child support, and can suffer from the “weekend father” syndrome.
Each year, Cassels Brock helps hundreds of people from all walks of life successfully resolve issues arising from a host of family and personal relationship-based conflicts. These include:
- Contested and uncontested divorces
- Contested child custody and access
- Contested property settlements
- Separation agreements
- Prenuptial and cohabitation agreements
- Paternity suits
- Child support and spousal support
Our lawyers have provided family law advice in prominent or unique cases, including:
- Achieving a favourable settlement for a husband whose wife made a claim for damages against him for infecting her with a sexually transmitted disease, in a case in which the client claimed he had informed his wife of the disease and she had consented to the risk;
- Acting for a father whose three estranged children demanded continued support from him for their post-secondary education expenses, and who at trial was relieved from further child support payments;
- Achieving higher child support payments for the mother of two daughters based on an investigation and reassessment of her self-employed husband’s annual income from $14,000 to $90,000 per annum;
- Negotiating reduced child support payments on the part of an NHL hockey player, who was served with a paternity suit six years after a sexual encounter with a woman, as well as having retroactive support payments cancelled and ensuring future payments would be renegotiated should his income decline;
- Negotiating a prenuptial agreement for a client who married a woman with net assets of $25 million, specifying that if the marriage failed, the husband would obtain structured payouts and support;
- Acting for a woman formerly married to an international banking executive who an investigation revealed to be hiding substantial assets abroad, and mediating a favourable settlement for the client and her three children;
- Negotiating an interim, equally shared child-custody arrangement for the father of a six-month-old boy, and later negotiating a parenting schedule by which overnight stays would be equally shared between the parents by the time the child turned two.
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