Speaker 1: Hi I'm Tammy and today I'm going to give you five secrets to influence your judge and I'm going to talk about it in the context of child custody in specific but this will help you no matter

Speaker 2: what you're trying to do. Now let me just say at the start if you're watching me on YouTube

Speaker 1: Please don't forget to hit like on this video and subscribe to the channel so you get notified as new videos are released each week. So let's get to my five tips here. So the first thing that you really need to do is look up the law. Look up the law in your state. You know so many people that I talk to they've heard of best interest of the child or they've heard this or this or that thing about support and all this different stuff, but people don't sit down as much and do research on that specific phrase. And if you are doing research on that specific phrase, where are you doing it at? If you're looking for blogs, if you're looking on Facebook, if you're going to social media and all those types of things, those aren't necessarily reliable sources, because sometimes there's somebody else's interpretation of what the law says. And so that's not always accurate. One of the nationwide sites is findlaw.com, F-I-N-D-L-A-W.com. Now, don't get me wrong, there's thousands and thousands of laws just in family law, not even to mention all the other areas of law. And so when you go to these sites, it can be a little bit daunting and a little bit overwhelming because you're going to see stuff from all different areas of law, but usually there are certain, they're numbered and so usually certain ranges of numbers apply to each kind of section of the law. And so you want to really research and understand, okay, best interest of the child. Again, that's a custody term I know that almost everybody is familiar with. If you've been in this for any length of time, you've obviously heard that term. But what does it actually mean? So sometimes I have new clients that will start, you know, I'll talk to them about best interest of the child. And next thing I know, all of their communication with the other parent says, well, I think we should do this because it's in the best interest of our child. I think we should do that because it's in the best interest of the child. But what it's more than just a phrase, you need to look it up and understand what it is in your state and most states and I'm gonna just huge widely kind of give you the the concept of what it means in most states but this isn't you know I'm not you need to go out and read it and look it up for yourself and understand it but in most states it has something to the effect of you know the best interest of the child is to have a relationship with both parents absent any concerns about health, safety, and welfare of the child, right? That's kind of a very big picture overview of what best interest of the child means in most states. But some states have more specific language in there than others. And so if you're in front of a judge on child custody, that's really the lens through which the judge is going to be viewing your case. So many times people get into situations where they're going in front of the court about all the things that the other parent does, right? Like the other parent's nasty to me and the other parent, you know, says things to the child they shouldn't say. And the other parent, you know, does A, B, C, or D, puts the child to bed without brushing their teeth. The other parent lets them stay up too late. The other parent curses too much around them. The other parent, whatever, pick your poison of what it is that, that you disagree with about how your ex-parents. That doesn't mean that those things rise to the level of you know the that best interest of the child example I gave. So it doesn't mean it rises to a health safety and welfare issue just because it's things that are maybe not so great parenting right. But what people tend to do is they tend to take all of those little issues and they want to throw all of them at the court. And what happens is, as the judge is reading this stuff, one, their eyes kind of start to glaze over, right? Because there's so much volume there. And you're giving them all these little things that have happened, most of which aren't really that significant. And so the court's kind of reading them going, yeah, this thing, yeah, that thing, dah, dah, I still don't see anything that says, you know, that it's an issue with safety or or the child's welfare or You know any of that kind of stuff? I will tell you education things I think tend to be a big thing in the courts eyes, too If you have a parent that's not getting them to school It's getting them to school late all that kind of thing. I have seen courts particularly here in California Shift parenting time because of that because one parent isn't prioritizing the child's education. So you have to Um, not dilute your arguments through throwing out all the little insignificant things. The next thing that I think is really challenging is, particularly if you are self-represented, is objections. I think these are one of the biggest challenges. I've watched this over and over. I've watched several different attorneys that I know do this over and over. And I will tell you that in my humble opinion, it is still one of the most challenging aspects to understand what you can object to, what you can't object to, and what the exceptions are to those objections, right? It's kind of like, I before E except after C, right? We all know that exception because it was drilled into our brain as a child. And so these things become drilled into the attorney's brain as they practice in their particular area of law, And they do things over and over and over hundreds of times. But of course, we as lay people don't have that benefit, right? So we're not gonna know off the top of our head what those exceptions are. I don't wanna get too deep on this because obviously I'm not an attorney. And so, you know, they've trained through this through law school and all that kind of thing. But again, those are in the code, the family law code in your state. So you can look up the code on hearsay. You can look up the code on objections and figure, or exceptions, excuse me. Objections are a whole nother thing, objecting, you know, based on hearsay. But exceptions to that objection are also in your code. One of the last things I would say is, You know, try to be organized when you go into court. You don't wanna just sit back and let the process happen to you. Things happen where you have to think on your feet and something you didn't expect comes up and all that kind of thing. But if you're organized and you have things labeled and you have your pieces of evidence and you have things that you think are relevant, you know, that's gonna be the point at which you're going to be able to think on your feet more effectively because something will come up and you'll be like, Oh, I have that right here. And you're going to have it at your fingertips and be able to pull it out. And a lot of times people go into court and they don't have any of the relevant papers with them. You know, I mean, sometimes you file something in the court doesn't get it right. I've seen that happen. I mean, these are all human beings working in the court system. Everybody makes mistakes. And so you may go in and the court may not have a copy of whatever it is. I know with Thomas, most of the time he would take two sets of everything with him. Sometimes three, if it was a, you know, a small amount of paper just so he could be sure like in case, in case the opposing party or the opposing attorney didn't get the copy in case the judge didn't get the copy. I mean, if you at least have one copy with you, at least the court can, can make copies a lot of times if they need to. But if you don't even have a single copy with you and the court's like, Oh, well, do you, do you have your filing that you did five days ago because it didn't make it to your file? And then you're like, Oh no. You know, the court can't really overcome that. Like you, you don't have it with you. And so it's really important to keep all of your documents in one place and keep the copies of them and keep them organized and labeled. And it doesn't hurt to have a backup copy in there. And that way, you go in, you feel confident, you've got all your information, and you know, when you're taking copies of things that you've filed, again, that doesn't mean you can't take other things with you. I mean, generally, you're, you know, both sides are supposed to give each other all the information that they intend to present. But I have seen situations where things come up and it's like, oh, does anybody have a copy of that with them? You know, maybe you already submitted a copy of a drug test for the other person six months ago but suddenly the court can't lay their hands on it and oh I just happen to have a copy right here. So anything that you think may be relevant I would take with me and of course, of course a notepad and pen okay because what's going to happen is you know you may think of things that you want to you know bring up or things that you want to address or object to and sometimes you end up with a continuance right. you go in and the court goes oh we're these issues are all still a problem and we're gonna continue this out for 30 days or 60 days. If you have those notes that you can go back and review and know what issues the court had concerns about or know things the judge said anything like that it's gonna be a huge help and having to go back and get transcripts every time can be really really expensive so it is helpful and sometimes you need the transcript I'm not saying to never do that but sometimes you don't need that level of depth you're just trying to remember a couple things and so you want to be able to write it down. The other thing that happens a lot of times is if you don't have an attorney on either side of the case, I know here in California and I think many states do this, is they will ask one of the parties to here in California they send them to the self-help office to prepare the order. Well what was the order? Well if you didn't and write it down, you may not know. You're gonna be left to, you know, the judge's clerk's recollection or the court reporter's recollection of what the orders were. And so it's real important because this is a big place where, you know, I see that mistakes can be made because there's a lot of things coming down all at once. And so that notepad, again, is really helpful because when the judge starts to say, okay, here's what we're gonna do, or here's what I'm gonna do, or here's what I'm gonna order, Anything like that leaves the judge's mouth. You go, oh, time for me to pick up my pen and you pick it up so you can start writing. And again, you're not gonna be able to get everything down in longhand in my experience, but you will be able to get down enough phrases to where you know what the orders were. You know what the parenting schedule is or what the amount of support is or what the exchange dates and times are, or how often one parent has to get drug testing and what the parameters are for that or whatever, whatever those orders are that are coming out of the judge's mouth, you want to be prepared to write all of that down. And so as a self-represented party, not typically something you know. And even if you have an attorney, it can be helpful if you take notes also, because then if your attorney's writing down the orders and you're writing down the orders, you might catch something that they missed, they might catch something that you missed, but you have a piece to cross reference off of, right? And a lot of times when Thomas would go to trial or have a really like, you know, significant hearing that he felt like was gonna be, you know, very complex and really require a lot of focus from him, a lot of times he would take me with him and have me do nothing but sit and take notes during the whole thing. And I know of other attorneys that do that. They always take a paralegal to court with them And the paralegal sits and just writes during the whole thing, writes about what was said, what the testimony was, anything the paralegal observes. And a lot of times, the attorney will then turn to the paralegal and say, hey, anything significant you observed, anything significant you heard, whatever. And that can help the attorney do their job better. And so not all attorneys do that. So it's helpful if you, as the client, can sort of be that extra set of eyes and ears in the courtroom. And again, that requires you to cut it off emotionally a little bit, right? You kind of have to get more into, you know, kind of professional mode. I'm here to do this job and observe these things and write notes and do all this stuff. And, you know, you have to kind of try to remove yourself emotionally so that you can focus on what needs to be happening and how you can help your attorney or help yourself in your case. So I hope those five secrets are helpful. I hope that that helps you better be able to manage your case. Again, if you're on YouTube, don't forget to hit like and subscribe. If you're listening to the podcast, please subscribe and rate and review me and I will see you all next week.