Schiff Hardin Attorneys Achieve Stellar Outcome for Wife with Disability
E is a woman in her 50s with a disability. In 1995, her husband fraudulently obtained a divorce while they were still living and raising their children together. The relationship finally fell apart in 2013, they separated, and E tried to file for divorce only to find out that she was apparently already divorced!
On her own, E figured out how to have the old divorce judgment vacated. Then, in 2018, she sought help from Schiff Hardin through its CVLS clinic to divorce her husband. The couple had a radical disparity in income, because the husband had pursued his career during the marriage while the wife maintained the home and cared for the children. E needed representation given the circumstances, and Schiff Hardin took her case pro bono.
The first thing her attorneys did was to petition the Court for temporary maintenance, or spousal support, to help their client get back on her feet financially while the divorce case was pending. Throughout discovery and settlement negotiations, E’s husband repeatedly missed maintenance payments. Schiff attorneys held his feet to the fire by going to court to enforce his obligation. They made sure he paid all his past-due of the maintenance he owed, in full.
E’s attorneys secured long-term maintenance for her and uncovered and pursued marital assets, including a retirement account and a personal injury settlement, that the husband had dissipated. Using creative problem-solving, E’s team got the court to order her now ex-husband to pay her for her share of those dissipated assets through installment payments.
Schiff Hardin’s representation of E was a collective effort. Among others, Matthew Griffin and Jin Yan put hundreds of hours into her case. Had the client paid for representation, it might have cost her tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, she was able to become financially stable and, at last, be properly divorced from her husband.
