Where To Begin With Estate Planning What if you are no longer able to control your assets due to health concerns? Your estate plan should detail who can access and manage your assets as your proxy. Ideally, this person or persons should be the same people who will eventually inherit your estate. Everyone should have...Read More

Do You Have A Will? Gifting and Estate Planning aren’t always top of mind. Estate planning is something you should think about long before retirement. There are several aspects to estate planning. Gifting is one of them. Gifts are subject to certain tax rules. Gifting assets can be beneficial to your estate in several ways....Read More

What Is Child Custody? How child custody is determined in Minnesota can be hard to navigate. Legal Custody gives you the right to make decisions about your child’s education, healthcare, and religious upbringing. Physical Custody- this is when your child lives with you. You make decisions about your child’s day-to-day activities, what they eat, wear,...Read More

Alcohol Charges Are Serious Everyone has seen the cliched drunk Santa in movies (and maybe even in real life). However, public intoxication is no joke. It’s also legal In Minnesota. Yes, you read that correctly. You can’t be arrested for simply being drunk in public. But don’t take that as permission to get soused and...Read More

What Is Supervised Visitation? Most of the time, when parents have visitation, they have the child during their scheduled time, and they can watch movies, eat, work on homework, and whatever else they feel like doing, unsupervised. But some visitation arrangements aren’t like that. Sometimes, a court order requires another adult to supervise the parenting...Read More

What Are Home Studies? Home Studies are required for adoptions, including those by a relative, foster care to adoption, and private adoptions. No matter what type of adoption you decide to move forward with, like all adoptive families in Minnesota, you must first be approved to adopt through a Minnesota-licensed home study provider. Home studies...Read More

A few generations ago, when someone was adopted, information about the birth parents was usually wholly unknown. Adoptions were closed. Today, it’s estimated that only 5 percent of adoptions are closed. “That means that 95 percent of today’s adoptions involve some level of openness, whether they are mediated, fully open, or somewhere in between.”[1] What...Read More

To begin the divorce process, you will need to have your spouse served with a summons and petition. This ensures that they know your intentions to divorce them and what you are asking for from the courts. While it may seem easy enough to have someone served, there are many ways that the process can...Read More

Fault vs. No-Fault Divorce can be confusing. Minnesota is a no-fault divorce state. What does that mean? What is the difference between fault and no-fault divorce? Grounds for divorce This is the difference between fault and no-fault divorce. With fault divorce, the person who is filing for divorce is saying it is their spouse’s fault...Read More

In almost every situation, you can file for divorce in Minnesota even if you were married in a foreign country. The most important considerations are: Whether the marriage is valid in the country in which it was performed Ensuring that your out-of-state spouse receives proper notice that the divorce is being filed If Your Spouse...Read More