In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Palm Beach County divorce attorney Denise Isaacs about the most common legal questions people have about family court.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome everyone to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we are going to discuss family court, and tackle some of the more challenging questions around family law.
Barbara La Pointe: And that is why we have brought on a very, very special guest speaker to help us really dive deep into this topic. Denise Isaacs is a Palm Beach County divorce attorney down in Florida who helps her clients in mediation and divorce. Over 90% of her clients settle out of court, but that doesn’t mean she won’t walk into family court for you.
Barbara La Pointe: In 2013 and 2014, Denise was selected as one of the women’s AV Preeminent attorneys, and she is a collaborative lawyer in Boca Raton. On the side, she shares her powerful wisdom on her TikTok channel, Denise Lawyer... or Divorce Lawyer Denise. Excuse me. So without further ado, welcome to the Broken Families podcast, Denise.
Denise Isaacs: It’s a pleasure to be here speaking with both of you. I appreciate your point of view. I appreciate Andrew’s point of view as well, and everything that you both bring to the subject.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s very nice of you. I know that you’re gonna offer a lot of value today, so thank you.
Barbara La Pointe: I’m gonna ask you our first question, and here it is. We don’t think about hiring a family lawyer until we’re faced with divorce. It’s right there in our face. What process should a person go through to determine who is the right family lawyer for them?
Denise Isaacs: The first thing that you wanna do is, in terms of a divorce or wanting a divorce, it doesn’t it’s a continuum. And there has to be a click in the back of the person’s mind that they can’t live in this marriage any longer for them to actually call a lawyer. But the best advice I can give you is that when you’re thinking about it, along the way, talk to a lawyer.
Denise Isaacs: Talk to two lawyers. Get a consult. It’s private. It’s confidential. Pay for it in cash. Don’t charge it on your credit card. And speak to a divorce lawyer and find out what your rights are. Find out what the law is because you’re in Canada, you’re in Michigan. Florida is different. I practice in Florida.
Denise Isaacs: And it’s very important to know what the laws are, especially with respect to parenting. You had asked me what kind of a lawyer you should look for. And the kind of a lawyer you should look for is they have to have at least 70% of their practice should be family law for a period of years.
Denise Isaacs: Lots of lawyers when they are starting out or when they’re not doing well dabble in family law. You don’t want a dabbler. What you want is somebody who is experienced. My practice is 100% family law and has been for at least 20 years, maybe longer. The second thing is you want a lawyer who doesn’t ignite fears and who doesn’t make a mountain out of a molehill.
Denise Isaacs: You want somebody who settles cases. You spoke about my rate of settling cases. When people agree, there is far less post-judgment fighting, court fighting and litigation. So the very best thing, nobody... people ask me do I win. It’s a joke. What do you mean do I win? If you have children, you’re not gonna see them at least at the most 50% of the time or 40% of the time.
Denise Isaacs: So it’s losing. It’s just a... And what you have to do is you need to understand that you’re negotiating for the rest of your life. You need to focus and you need to pick exactly what is most important to you, what your goals are. And so when you’re picking a lawyer, you have to ask the lawyer how often and what percentage of their cases do they litigate.
Denise Isaacs: What percentage of their cases go to court, to trial? And you’ll find out a little bit more about them. When people are fearful in divorce, and everybody’s fearful, the thing to do is not to find the most highness difficult pit bull to represent you. That is, it’s just losing two years of your life and losing your children’s college education for no reason. Find yourself someone who is grounded, who settles their cases, and who’s not going to write these nasty letters to the other side so that you’re always in court on little hearings all the time.
Denise Isaacs: That’s something that you should look for and then change lawyers. Because sometimes you have to go to court, but generally speaking, you should be focusing on what’s important. Not on whether or not the other person gave a haircut to the child. Not on whether or not something petty happened.
Denise Isaacs: You have to start out the right way, and the right way is making sure that you’re not going to push the other person’s buttons. There’s another question that you were gonna ask me a little bit later, and that’s about dating during divorce. Okay. So this is the deal. When you’re dating, can you date during divorce?
Denise Isaacs: Find out from your lawyer. I can only give you the Florida perspective. And if you’re going to be dating during divorce, make sure that you don’t go to the restaurants that your soon-to-be ex’s friends go to or the favorite restaurant where you proposed to her. I swear to you, people do that.
Denise Isaacs: Okay? You need to make sure that you don’t flaunt it in the other person’s face. You need not to introduce the other party who you are seeing to the children for months until after the divorce or until a certain point where the relationship is stable. Because you don’t want to upset your children, but you are going to.
Denise Isaacs: Your divorce is gonna cost twice as much. The other side’s gonna go crazy. Why? But there is the other issue. Okay, the other issue is why or how people get divorced. Okay. One of the reasons that people get divorced is that one of them is having an affair, and it’s usually, I would say, about 20% more common for men to have affairs.
Denise Isaacs: Why? ‘Cause it’s the end of the relationship. It’s the end of the marriage affair. And what it is is that the person who’s having the affair doesn’t have the guts to tell his partner, to tell his wife that the marriage is over and he is leaving, so what he does is have an affair, make sure that he leaves, that he charges it, and he leaves the invoices or the bills around somewhere because she’s surely gonna be looking in his pockets and in the garbage cans in the bathroom to find out what’s happening so that she sues him for divorce as opposed to him telling her that he wants the divorce.
Denise Isaacs: And this is true the other way also, of women who do this. But more than, in my experience, which is at least 40 years, boo-boo, that’s what happens. And so what you need to do is you need to understand that you control the divorce process. Your lawyer sends out a nasty letter to the other side, you control it by telling your lawyer not to do that anymore, and you call the other side and you tell them that that wasn’t right.
Denise Isaacs: Because divorce is all about humiliation. Sorry. That’s what happens in people’s minds. It’s all about trying to look as good as you possibly can to yourself, the judge, and God. It’s a very emotional point, and people don’t like being criticized. But being criticized in public and having motions where they say nasty things about you in the public court, it’s terrible.
Denise Isaacs: It’s just absolutely terrible. So if your lawyer is doing that, you need to make sure that your lawyer doesn’t, one, charge you a fortune every time they send a letter, then they get a letter back, then they send a letter back, then they send a letter back. You can control your divorce and you control the costs of your divorce also by controlling and participating in your divorce.
Denise Isaacs: You don’t just step back and say, “Oh, this is what happened. The lawyer did this.” No. It’s like saying the car hit the person in the middle of the road. It wasn’t you. Yeah, it is you. You control your divorce, you control your divorce lawyer and to the best extent. There are crazoids.
Denise Isaacs: There are crazoids out there and there are. But it’s 10%. 90% are not like that.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, Denise, I think you have such a valuable and pragmatic, common sense message for lawyers and families. So often women feel that they’ve lost control during their divorce. And by the way, I found it to be a very humiliating experience, so I totally get what you’re saying.
Barbara La Pointe: It is very humiliating. We address many families who are in high-conflict divorces. Do you have any... you kind of spoke to that already, but it’s hard if one party goes out and gets a collaborative lawyer and then the other party goes out and gets one of those, what did you call them?
Barbara La Pointe: Crazy lawyers that write letters and things and how could you deescalate a situation like that?
Denise Isaacs: The only thing that you can do is control your actions. It’s like life.
Denise Isaacs: Ultimately, you can control your actions to the best of your ability. There are that 10%. It’s not even one in 10 cases.
Denise Isaacs: I would say it’s one in 35 cases where it could be the wife or it could be the husband, is seeking revenge. And they throw the children under the bus. They don’t care about the children, they just use the children in order to hurt the other side. And it’s just really the saddest, saddest thing.
Denise Isaacs: So you have another question that said, “What do you do?” I know I just told you not to go to court, but from the beginning you have to protect your rights. You have to protect your rights to see your own children and not let the other person, because there are cases where, let’s say, one of the parents says that the other parent is molesting the child.
Denise Isaacs: It gets into another area and it’s one way of ruining the children’s lives and ruining everyone else’s lives. And it’s something that is very, very rare. It’s very, very rare, but it happens. It also happens that in Florida you can’t get the other person out. So there are instances where.
Denise Isaacs: A talks to B, B talks to C, C talks to D, and they find out that the only way to get so-and-so out of the house is to make a call to the police and say that there has been a domestic violence incident. There usually has to be some sort of evidence, hands, some sort of bruise.
Denise Isaacs: But even without a bruise, you can get the other person to get arrested. It’s really thrilling to get them arrested and have the police walk the other parent out of the house. It’s terrible. It’s searing on the children’s consciousness. They’ll remember it forever. Serving... Oh, here’s another thing.
Denise Isaacs: Serving people a case in order for it to proceed, you have to give notice to the other side. It’s called serving them, due process. Right. So what happens is you have to make sure that the person is not served in front of the children, is not... Serve them at work. Serve them somewhere else, but don’t serve them on the field when they’re playing, when all their little friends are around, and all the mothers and fathers are around, and they’re playing soccer.
Denise Isaacs: That is not right. It’s not right. There’s a certain amount of fairness that’s involved, and that’s not fair. And...
Andrew Folkler: You’re absolutely right though. And you definitely touched on a lot of really powerful points. Like we actually got a chance to interview Dean Tong not too long ago. It was about a month or so ago, and he specializes in dealing with either false accusations of domestic violence or even child molestation.
Andrew Folkler: And it was a really harrowing interview. It was definitely. And so I can definitely see where you’re coming from as far as, one, keeping the kids out of it, and two, not turning it into a game of chicken where who can humiliate the other party first before you both buckle underneath the pain, the trauma, and the hurt from that pretty much accumulates throughout this entire process.
Andrew Folkler: And it’s definitely difficult, ‘cause both Barbara and I talk a lot to people who are dealing with either a high-conflict person or... and especially in the cases of parental alienation where they’re pretty much actively keeping the kids away. One thing I was kinda curious to hear your opinions on, this is a bit more relevant towards the current situation, especially with COVID.
Andrew Folkler: Some parents have had their visitation agreements, you could say, not overlooked, but just kind of walked on due to the fact that COVID-19 has put a halt to a lot of things. And so maybe they haven’t been able to see their kids for a while. I know I have friends, back from middle school and high school who are in their mid-20s now.
Andrew Folkler: They’ve got a kid with somebody. Things didn’t quite work out, and now they can’t see their kid. They haven’t seen their kid since COVID started. What would be the right course of action for someone like that?
Denise Isaacs: Well, let’s talk about distance. If they’re in the same area or they’re within hours, there is and I just wanna go back a little bit. Children have been staying home. They just started going back to school. But before this, for the year and a half, they’ve been staying home and being homeschooled. There is a computer there. So I had a couple of clients who said that the mother wanted the children to be homeschooled during the week.
Denise Isaacs: Well, if they’re going to be watching a computer from school, they can watch the computer from school in the other parent’s house. I represent 50% men and 50% women. There’s no reason for the child to have to be there. And the courts have been open, and you can bring a motion to enforce your agreement if you’re here.
Denise Isaacs: Now, at the beginning of COVID, people stopped flying. That is a problem. However, it was the summer, I think the summer of 2020, I had a number of parents who drove wherever they had to drive to pick up the child and then come back and bring the child to their house so that the child could spend time at their house.
Denise Isaacs: But little children, it is terrible for little children not to see their parents regularly. And the question is, what do you do that’s the best for the child? And taking a child away from the parent, taking a two-year-old away from the parent that they’ve been with and having them with you for a month without seeing the other parent is abusive.
Denise Isaacs: It’s just emotionally abusive to the child. So you have to figure things out because also able to work remotely. So maybe you go and you rent an apartment or rent an Airbnb or VRBO or something, and you work out of there. And then the other parent, then you can share the children.
Denise Isaacs: So there’s a lot of things that people could do during COVID in order to have access to their children so that they could see them and love them and be with them.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. I could definitely see how pretty much taking a no matter what the cost kind of mindset just to try and make sure you bridge that gap with the kids. That said, I could only see that work with amicable uncoupling in the sense where if there was a lot of conflict in between the two parents, then that probably wouldn’t quite work in that sense.
Andrew Folkler: So would that be something that you would want to start, in a sense, documenting and addressing in family court?
Denise Isaacs: One of the questions that you both were asking is what do you do when you’re approaching a divorce? If one party is working till 9:00 o’clock and they leave at 7:00 o’clock in the morning and they’re never there and they work weekends, what you need to do is, in Florida, have a diary.
Denise Isaacs: And in your diary you have to make contemporaneous notes. You can’t make it later. You can’t make it three weeks later. You have to have a diary that is contemporaneous that says what is going on. It is very hard to do it because people... It’s hard. But the best evidence is the devil’s in the details.
Denise Isaacs: I once won custody for the father because he kept notes on where the mother was and what she was doing and that she wasn’t there for the child and that she would go away for a week or two or she would be gone during the weekends. And he also kept a list of what he did with the child.
Denise Isaacs: I coach my clients. Okay, I coach them. I like when they come to me before the divorce or at the beginning of the divorce, so if they haven’t been participating, they can start participating. They can make a deal. Even if they’re living in the same house, they can make a parenting plan for time sharing so that they can work late till 10:00 o’clock at night one night and they can be there at 3:00 or 4:00 o’clock the next day.
Denise Isaacs: So there are ways of working around and keeping track of what’s going on or changing. Here’s the other thing. There’s lots of my clients, my female clients, the mothers, tell me that the father hasn’t participated. He didn’t change a diaper. He didn’t make this, that, or the other thing.
Denise Isaacs: Well, it’s water under the bridge. If he comes to the point where he wants 50/50, he’s gotta step up to the plate and participate and get coaching and get parental coaching and be aware of development and read about development and come home and be home when the children are home.
Denise Isaacs: Because there’s the right of first refusal, so that if the parent is not gonna be there, the other parent gets to have the children if it’s for more than three, four hours. Or sometimes it’s longer, depending on the age. So there are lots of things that you can do even if you’re in a bad situation where you haven’t seen the child, where you have this super traditional marriage where she stays home with the children and he goes to work.
Denise Isaacs: Because in Florida, both parents are very important to the children. Very, very important to the children. So the courts are going to give an opportunity for the parent who was previously absent and didn’t participate to begin to participate. To go to the games, to go take the child to the library or to read library books, and then you need to document it.
Denise Isaacs: There’s a thousand things to do in order to be an involved parent.
Barbara La Pointe: So Denise, it seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that we’re no longer living in a reality where moms automatically get custody of their children. Would you agree with that, or?
Denise Isaacs: Yes. In the old days, there was a legal doctrine called the Tender Years Doctrine, and that’s children of tender years should be with their mothers.
Denise Isaacs: You know the Angelina Jolie case?
Barbara La Pointe: Yes.
Denise Isaacs: Okay. So her mother had custody. ‘Cause in the old days, the mother always got custody, and I think it was Jon Voight is the father, and she lived with all these other men and he didn’t see his children very often, and Angelina Jolie felt very angry at her father for not being there.
Denise Isaacs: And her mother was the only one in her life. So that’s what she’s trying to do to Brad Pitt, who’s fighting to be able to be in his children’s lives, and this is 2021. It’s not 1950 or 1960, where women got custody. Florida, for example, used to have custody, and more women than not got custody.
Denise Isaacs: Then they changed it and there was a primary custodial parent. Both parents had custody, but there was a primary custodial parent. Now, we don’t have custody at all. We have shared parental responsibility, and that means that there isn’t custody any longer. And so that happens to be good, because if you’re resentful and you’re the parent on the out who’s the non-custodial parent, you have to beg the custodial parent for anything.
Denise Isaacs: They have total control over everything, and you’re there with your tin can asking, “Please, can I see my children? Please can I see my children?” Which I think is what happened with Jon Voight, and I think that Angelina Jolie’s mother cut him out. And so she learned at her mother’s knee how to be a mother and cut out the father, and that’s what she’s continuing to do.
Denise Isaacs: Can you imagine five, six years already they’re fighting over custody of all their children? It’s terrible. And then she says, “Oh, he was so bad. He did this, that,” and then all of a sudden he cleans up his act because he wants his children and she says, “Well, five years ago he did this.
Denise Isaacs: Six years ago he did that.” Who cares? The question is, are the children in danger now? No. Do the children, will the children benefit from seeing their father 50% of the time? Yes. But now the old judge is out and they’re gonna get a new judge. Ugh. It’s terrible.
Denise Isaacs: It’s just terrible. So we’ll see what happens.
Barbara La Pointe: I guess that’s really an example of how family patterns repeats down through time it is. And an example of how you can spend a lot of money on a high-conflict divorce...
Denise Isaacs: Where only one party is the conflictual one, and the other one keeps his mouth shut and is just trying to see his children as quietly as possible and not be in court.
Denise Isaacs: So they picked a private lawyer to be their judge, and then she was very unhappy with the judge. She thought the judge was on the father’s side, and so she did everything she could to have him recused, which is off the case, and ultimately she was successful. And now they have to go back and battle everything all over again.
Denise Isaacs: But there’s just too much evidence of a father who is... He doesn’t have to be father of the year, but he’s a good father, and he’s not doing any drugs or alcohol, and hasn’t for years. And so it just doesn’t make any sense for her to continue to fight to keep him out except that she learned at her mother’s knee, and that’s really a shame.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s a shame. That is a fascinating case to watch in modern culture, a divorce and...
Denise Isaacs: Sad, sad, sad.
Barbara La Pointe: Denise, I want to invite you to talk to us a little bit about child support.
Denise Isaacs: Child support used to be enough to help mothers. I want you to know that.
Denise Isaacs: I used to march, okay? I lived in New York City, and I used to march for all sorts of things. And one of them is that women made 59 cents to the dollar that men did, and it’s gotten better. Maybe it hit 67 cents to the dollar or more, but men make more money than women. And except in 20, 25% of the cases.
Denise Isaacs: So in the 75% of the cases, and in people who have traditional marriages, even women who have degrees to be doing all sorts of things that they could have made money at, stay home to take care of the children, ‘cause both parents thought that having the mother home taking care of the children was the best for the children.
Denise Isaacs: So then what happens is we have somebody who’s 40 years old and has given up the last 15 years of her life to be there for the children, and then the father comes in. It happens periodically with men, but it’s usually the women, who says, “All right. Yeah, you did. Thank you very much. I want 50%, and I don’t wanna pay you alimony.
Denise Isaacs: I don’t wanna pay you support, and in terms of child support, I’ll pay you the child support.” Well, what happened in Florida is child support is minimal. It’s just minimal. And I also was researching this, and the average amount of money that is paid for child support is somewhere around 350 to $360 a month.
Denise Isaacs: That’s not enough for anything. That’s just not enough for anything. So child support, Florida in the last more than 20 years hasn’t changed the amount of child support. It’s now based on very old numbers, and child support hasn’t been increased. So as far as I’m concerned, child support is very, very little.
Denise Isaacs: It’s so little that it’s really embarrassing.
Barbara La Pointe: I think that’s a really important point that is undervalued, not often talked about. Because sometimes when you’re making a divorce plan to leave, you might consider your expenses. How much will I receive in child support if you’re a woman, or if you’re a man.
Barbara La Pointe: And if it’s low, it makes it harder to leave. But in any event, you have to know what your incoming revenue is, and it’s very, very expensive to raise a child. So just to think that child support is low was shocking to me. Really shocking.
Denise Isaacs: Well, it’s shocking, but the other thing is that you need to take the pre-divorce time if you wanted to be a teacher, if you wanted to be a nail tech, if you wanna be an esthetician, you wanna get your MBA, you wanna complete your college education, you want to do graduate school in rehabilitation and rehab therapy.
Denise Isaacs: All of these things you can start before the divorce. Don’t wait. Or even whenever it is. The judge is gonna wanna see how focused and how willing the person is to rehabilitate themselves. So what you need to do is I think that in this world that women and men need to think about supporting themselves.
Denise Isaacs: How they’re gonna support themselves if something happens or if they get divorced. And keeping up your license if you have a license so that you don’t have to redo it again is very important. If you wanna go back to college or you wanna go to college ‘cause you gave it up because you became pregnant or for whatever reason.
Denise Isaacs: I have men who supported their wives to become accountants and to get their degrees and to get whatever, and then they were left behind. And financially. So you can see there are more women who stay home, but there are lots of men who give up a lot in order to be in the marriage and are very generous to their spouses.
Denise Isaacs: Child support is just not enough to support you because they take into account both houses. It used to be just that the custodial parent got it, but when there was no custodial parent anymore and it’s a shared parental responsibility, child support was halved, and it wasn’t enough to begin with.
Denise Isaacs: So it makes a situation of haves and have-nots. And I want you to know that there are lots of husbands who are very concerned about their wives and children and want them to stay in the marital home. Even though it’s going to cost them more money, they don’t want them to be hurt. Men come to me because they don’t wanna throw their families under the bus.
Denise Isaacs: They don’t wanna be taken advantage of, but they want to have everything go more smoothly, and they wanna be protected from what they perceive is their wife having the children and having all the fairness and the halo on her side.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s encouraging. That’s very encouraging to hear. Moving forward after divorce, if someone wants to remarry, would you recommend a prenup?
Barbara La Pointe: I don’t know anything about prenups, but sometimes I notice men are a little nervous to get married again. Could a prenup help?
Denise Isaacs: Look at the Gateses. Okay? So they didn’t have a prenup. He is one of those men who went into marriage and thought that everything I have is yours. Now, of course, he didn’t have to worry. He was a billionaire, I think, when they got married. So money wasn’t an object.
Denise Isaacs: And he grew up in a household where his mother and his father were intact, and it was a loving marriage where they both helped each other. So he didn’t seek out a prenup. But if he ever gets married again, I’m sure he’s going to get a prenup. So anyone going into their second marriage needs a prenup.
Denise Isaacs: Anyone going into their first marriage needs a prenup. Even if they have nothing, they need a prenup. Why? Here are the couple of things that you have to think about with a prenup. Alimony. You can cut off alimony. You can cut off the other party. You can give the other party nothing. After 25 years of marriage, the other party gets nothing.
Denise Isaacs: No alimony, no participation. Let’s say Barbara and Jim got married. Jim had a liquor store. Barbara stayed home with the children. They had a prenup. Barbara didn’t work for 23 years. That one liquor store turned into 40, and now it’s a billion-dollar business. Barbara gets nothing.
Denise Isaacs: Gets nothing. The only thing she’ll get is she might actually get an amount of child support to be able to support the children if they’re not already grown already or in their teenage years. But there’s nothing wrong with protecting a family business. There’s nothing wrong with protecting what you had before. But the question is, if you think about marriage as something that’s going to last for 30 or 40 years, there has to be some sort of marital property that is developing so that all the money that goes into after divorce, I’m sorry, after the marriage, all the money that goes into a pension plan, a 401, an IRA, whatever, that is marital.
Denise Isaacs: Or you give X amount of dollars per year, or you settle a certain amount. And if you’re giving dollars, what usually happens in prenups is the person doesn’t get the money till the end. Well, I try to have the person get the money at the beginning because money grows. So $100,000 could end up being $300,000, and so the person would actually have money at the end.
Denise Isaacs: It’s just startling how many men want prenups because they don’t have to pay alimony and everybody keeps what they have. But the question is, okay, they had it before, but what happens in the marriage? We don’t want the other person to end up with nothing, living under a bridge. So prenups are necessary, and I think that people have to think about the prenups because I’ve gotten to the point where I won’t do a prenup if somebody comes into me and there’s nothing, and they’re gonna get nothing.
Denise Isaacs: I won’t even accept their money. I give them their money back because there’s no reason for someone to give away their entire life. Oh, they’re going to have children. Oh, and she’s gonna stay home with the children. Well, when you’re staying home with the children, you’re losing the ability to have a career and to grow with that career.
Denise Isaacs: If you step out of the career, nobody’s gonna want you. You’re gonna start at the bottom again, and you’re going to have to keep up your license and keep up your knowledge and keep up the credits that you need. It’s just people need to think about life in terms of their whole life, and it’s very hard when you’re in your 20s.
Denise Isaacs: You say, “Oh, well, what do I need?” Well, when you’re older, you need more, and you need security.
Barbara La Pointe: So that’s a great point, Denise. A lot of people don’t think about many of the points that you’re bringing to the table today. Thank you. There’s a lot to consider and I admire your compassion and integrity.
Denise Isaacs: I do. I point out to the husbands or the fiances that the prenup can be a pathway to divorce. So why do they wanna start out being unfair to the other party? Because it’s just gonna make the other party upset and the marital home should be joint at a certain point, maybe after five years. There needs to be some... how can you have $12 million and you’re not gonna pay alimony, you don’t want the other party to participate in any of your wealth or your developing wealth, and then you live in a palace and they’re in a rented apartment for $900 in a terrible area where your children are gonna be living.
Denise Isaacs: That is really scary, and it’s not fair. And it is fair, prenups are fair if both parties look at it and they think about what’s going to be happening, and that’s what I try to point out to my clients.
Barbara La Pointe: Very helpful. Well, Denise, let’s have a little bit of fun here before we close this podcast.
Barbara La Pointe: So you’ve been married for a long time, is it 35 years?
Denise Isaacs: 40.
Barbara La Pointe: 40 years. And how long have you been a divorce attorney?
Denise Isaacs: 43 years.
Barbara La Pointe: And you still seem to be so passionate and it seems like you love what you do. But it also seems like it’d be really hard to be a divorce attorney. Do you ever get depressed?
Barbara La Pointe: Or how do you do it?
Denise Isaacs: I have to love my clients just a little. I can’t love them enough so that I’m their mother. I have to love them just a little, and I need to step back and I need to tell them, “Beginning, middle end. This is gonna be over. What are you gonna do afterwards? What are your goals?
Denise Isaacs: What’s your priorities? Let’s just forget about the fishing rods. She took the fishing rods and sold them. Forget about the fishing rods. Forget about this. Forget about that. Just hone it.” I do collaborative law as well as litigation. Okay. And I love collaborative law.
Denise Isaacs: Collaborative law as opposed to litigation, in litigation what you do is you send papers back and forth, you don’t speak to each other until you go to mediation at the end after you’ve spent a lot of your money. In collaborative law what happens is two lawyers, two clients, and you sit at a table.
Denise Isaacs: You sit at a table a couple of times. You have one neutral financial person who helps you so that there is financial transparency, and then what you do is this financial transparency, and there is a facilitator. The facilitator is usually a therapist who sits there and keeps everyone calm. Just keeps everyone calm and keeps everything rolling forward and has everybody acting their very best, including the lawyers.
Denise Isaacs: Okay? So it’s just a question, what is divorce? Divorce is you divide up the money however the money is gonna be divided. Then you have the children and you have the children’s issues. So you need to put the children first and both parties put the children first to the best of their ability.
Denise Isaacs: It’s not always. A collaborative law is not just for cases that are civil. It’s also for cases where people are really, really conflictual. I’ve had very conflictual cases over all sorts of things, and what you do is you sit down and instead of waiting and having litigation paranoia, ‘cause that’s what happens, litigation paranoia and people get crazier and crazier and crazier.
Denise Isaacs: You’re sitting at the table with the other person, and there’s the facilitator, and there’s the neutral financial person. So you take care of the financial issues, and then what you do is you can bring in additional therapists for the children’s issues. Or you just sit there and you work them out, and everyone at the beginning signs an agreement that they’re going to put the children first and what their goals are, and they say what their goals are.
Denise Isaacs: And then you try to get everyone the best however you can do it. So is the judge going to have the house sold? Probably. But the other party feels that the children should stay in the house at least till they’re out of middle school or till they’re out of elementary school or till they graduate from high school.
Denise Isaacs: It’s important for the children. So you give up a little bit, and you give up a little money in order to have your child be able to thrive. And so that’s what a lot of parents do, both mothers and fathers. Most parents do this. It is only the alienating parts or the crazoids, they’re only a little bit, and I don’t even think they’re 10%.
Denise Isaacs: I think they’re less than 10%. And most people, even though they’re at their worst point in divorce, they... When it’s put to them in terms where it’s not at court where you have to show that the other person is this horrible person, and you have to smack him 15 times to show the judge he did this, he did that, he did this, or to show that she was an alcoholic.
Denise Isaacs: But for 15 years, 12 years, she was recovering, and then during the divorce for six weeks she fell off it. And yes, she drove with a child once, but then she got back on the horse again, and she’s doing well. First of all, do you want that to be in the public record where your children can look it up? Do you want your children reading this crap that you are writing about each other?
Denise Isaacs: No. No, you don’t want that at all. So most people... So how do I like my business? I try to get some distance. I try to keep people’s perspective. And most people are good, and they wanna do things that are fair, although it’s fair from their point of view. But then what you do is you negotiate. And then you enter into an agreement, either litigation or collaborative, and people live with it.
Denise Isaacs: No, they’re not happy, but they don’t feel like they’ve been taken advantage of. And that’s the best way to live. And if you’ve been stabbed in the back he had an affair. Okay, she had an affair with the tennis instructor. You need to get over it. You need to just get over it and get on with it. And I’m on TikTok and Instagram.
Denise Isaacs: I discovered it in January and I have videos on there. And I look at all the different people that are on there and their points of view.
Denise Isaacs: And you have to make a decision about your life. Are you gonna be positive or are you going to spend the rest of your life looking back over your shoulder and feeling like a victim and feeling like you’ve been taken advantage of? That’s ruining your own life instead of moving forward and having the best life you possibly can.
Denise Isaacs: And those are the parts of the social media that I really love. I just love reading all these things about people moving on. It’s very inspiring.
Barbara La Pointe: It is inspiring. Yeah, absolutely. And your message is positive, it’s solution focused and fair and speaks to me of integrity. And I love your social media videos.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you. They’re my favorite. I wish you would’ve been my lawyer.
Denise Isaacs: All I can tell you is that people need to know that they need to take back control of their lives. Divorce is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity not only to run your divorce and control your divorce, but to control your life and to decide how you’re gonna live at that moment.
Denise Isaacs: It’s just an opportunity for the future. And you’re dealt a... You can be dealt a really bad deck of cards. And I had someone come and see me who I represented the stepmother years ago. Okay? Years and years ago. And she got handed a terrible, terrible, terrible hand.
Denise Isaacs: And she was positive. She went forward and she married this lovely man. They’ve been married for 20, 30 years, and she’s so happy and it just so happens that... And this man takes very good care of her, and she’s so happy, and I’m so happy. I have clients coming to me from... I represented their parents.
Denise Isaacs: And in one case I represented the father, and the mother sent the son to me because she thought that I was tough, and that’s why he came to me. But I don’t consider myself tough. I consider myself realistic and positive to help people. It is what it is. You’re gonna get a divorce, so better to just start at the beginning, get everything together, get your best deal that you possibly can, and move on.
Denise Isaacs: And it is the backward-looking people, that alienation part, who have the chip on their shoulder forever. It doesn’t come off. It just never, never, never comes off, and it is really a shame. It’s really a shame. At the beginning of my career, I represented this lovely man who had remarried at the point that I met him, and he had two other little children.
Denise Isaacs: And his wife put him through the wringer, saying that he was doing all these things to the child that he had. And he had fought and fought and fought and fought and fought, and then he said he was giving up. And that was it. He was gonna wait for the child to come, when the child turns of age to come to him.
Denise Isaacs: And I fought him. I was so upset for a really long time. And then ultimately he gave her 100% custody and walked away. And so I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in 20-something years. I don’t know what happened. But he taught me something. It was ruining his current life. He had spent all of his money hiring different experts to say that, no, he didn’t abuse the child.
Denise Isaacs: And it didn’t matter. Then she moved somewhere else. Then she moved somewhere else and he couldn’t fight anymore. It was ruining his life. So he just stepped back. He said, “I love my child, but I can’t ruin my life anymore.” And that made me really sad. So did I have perspective at that time?
Denise Isaacs: No. No. Sometimes I lose perspective now. People just draw me in, and I try not to, and every once in a while it’s just hard. It’s just hard. So I need to make sure that I don’t handle crazoid cases. I’m just telling you. And that’s how I deal with the 90% of the people and not the total alienation and the total false accusation cases.
Denise Isaacs: I send them to other lawyers. Did you say that you spoke to Charlie Jamison?
Andrew Folkler: No. Yeah.
Denise Isaacs: Is that who you spoke to? Okay, well, you should. I’ll send you his information. So I would send it to him because he is an expert in that, and I just don’t have the heart for it. I just so you asked if I love what I do. Yes, as long as I keep it within the normal limits.
Andrew Folkler: I think that’s a really beautiful thing to say, and it’s also good to remember that we’re all human. Yeah. At the end of the day, we’re all human, and we all want to live, to grow, to watch children grow, and just to live a damn good life is the best way I can put it.
Denise Isaacs: Yeah, you’re right. You’re right.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. Well, Denise, we’re right about at that hour mark. I wanted to ask you real quick, just for listeners who may want to contact you in the future, what would be the best way for them to do so?
Denise Isaacs: They can call my office. I’m in Boca Raton, Florida, and my name is Denise Rappaport Isaacs, and it’s the Isaacs Family Law Group.
Denise Isaacs: And they can call my office or go on my website. I practice all over Florida, and in Dade County, Broward, Martin, Palm Beach, Orlando, Naples. I practice all over. And especially now with COVID, it expanded my practice. And they can call my office or go on my website and get in touch with me right through my website, or they can call my office, whatever.
Denise Isaacs: And thank you very much.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely, Denise. Thank you so much. And that is all we have time for today. Once again, everyone, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or through the various podcasting platforms.