Every other dispute you will ever have is decided by working out who is in the wrong. A custody matter is not. The court has been given one question — what is best for this child — and the law says so in terms: Section 17 of the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 requires the court to be guided by the welfare of the minor, and Section 13 of the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 makes it the paramount consideration. Parents arrive with the case they have been rehearsing for two years — who left, who lied, who earns what — and discover that almost none of it is being asked about. This page is about the case that is being asked about.
Most people open a page like this on a bad evening, usually within a day or two of something happening — a child not returned after a visit, a message saying you will not be allowed to see them, a notice from a court, or the moment in a separation when somebody first says the word custody out loud. So the practical part comes first and the law afterwards.
The court answers one question — the welfare of the child — and not the question of who was right. Custody, guardianship and access are three separate things, and asking for the wrong one wastes months. A very young child has a starting position under Section 6(a), but it is a starting position and not a rule. And the arrangement two parents write down themselves, in detail, is almost always better for the child than the one a court has to impose on them.
The statutes are unusually direct about this. Section 17 of the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 says that in appointing or declaring the guardian of a minor the court shall be guided by what, consistently with the law to which the minor is subject, appears in the circumstances to be for the welfare of the minor. Section 13 of the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 goes further and says that in the appointment or declaration of any person as guardian the welfare of the minor shall be the paramount consideration — and that no person shall be entitled to act as guardian by virtue of any provision of that Act or of any law relating to guardianship in marriage if the court is of opinion that it will not be for the welfare of the minor.
Read that second half again, because it is the sentence people skip. It says that a legal entitlement can be set aside where the welfare of the child requires it. The Supreme Court applied exactly that in Gaurav Nagpal v. Sumedha Nagpal (2008), holding that the statutory right of a parent yields to the welfare of the child; and in Nil Ratan Kundu v. Abhijit Kundu (2008) it said that in custody matters the court is not deciding a question of the rights of parents at all. The oldest statement of it is Rosy Jacob v. Jacob A. Chakramakkal (1973), where the Court observed that children are not property to be divided between two claimants.
Nothing on this page is more useful than that idea, because it re-sorts every argument you were planning to make. A fact helps you if it tells the court something about the child’s life. It does nothing for you — and sometimes actively harms you — if it only tells the court something about the other parent’s character. That is not a rule about being fair. It is a description of what the court was given jurisdiction to decide.
This table is the argument of the page in one place. The left column is what people put in their first draft; the right column is what the court is actually weighing.
| What the parent leads with | What weight it really carries |
|---|---|
| Who was at fault in the marriage | Little, unless the conduct bears on the child — violence in the home, addiction, neglect |
| “I earn more, I can give a better life” | Limited. The other parent’s income is addressed through maintenance, not by moving the child |
| “It is my legal right as the father/mother” | A factor, and expressly subordinate to welfare under Section 13 |
| A large joint family, a bigger house | Relevant only as part of the child’s actual care arrangement, not as a comparison of assets |
| Recordings and messages proving the other parent said something ugly | Usually neutral, often counter-productive, and damaging where the child was recorded |
| Who the child says they want to live with | Considered where the child is old enough, under Section 17(3) — and discounted where it looks coached |
| The child’s school, health, routine and settled surroundings | Heavily. This is the case. |
| Which parent has actually been doing the daily caring | Heavily, and it is provable from third-party records |
| Which parent keeps the other informed and does not obstruct contact | Increasingly, and courts say so explicitly |
If your draft petition is mostly the top half of that table, it is a divorce petition wearing a custody petition’s clothes. Every experienced family advocate has the same first conversation with a new client, and it consists of moving material from the top half to the bottom half.
These get used interchangeably in conversation and they are not interchangeable in a petition.
| Word | What it means | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Guardianship | Legal authority over the minor — and, separately, over the minor’s property. The power to consent, sign and deal on the child’s behalf | Guardians and Wards Act, 1890; Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956; personal law |
| Custody | Day-to-day care and control — where the child lives, who runs the child’s life | The same Acts, plus Section 26 of the Hindu Marriage Act inside a matrimonial case |
| Access or visitation | The contact the parent who does not have custody has with the child | Court’s power under the welfare jurisdiction; recognised as the child’s right |
The consequences of the distinction are practical. A parent can hold guardianship and not have custody, which is why a school or a passport office may still require the other parent’s signature even though the child lives with you. A parent can have custody and still be unable to take a decision alone. And a parent with neither still has a claim to access, because access is understood as belonging to the child rather than to the adult who is asking for it.
When you first speak to an advocate, say which of the three you actually want and why. “I want custody” is very often, on examination, “I want the child to keep living with me and I want to stop being cut out of school decisions”, which is a different and much easier case to run.
Two statutes and a personal law usually sit on the same table.
| Law | Who it covers | What it does here |
|---|---|---|
| Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 | General — applies across communities | The machinery: appointing a guardian, custody of a ward, interim orders, and the welfare direction in Section 17 |
| Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 | Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs | Natural guardianship in Section 6, the position for a child under five, and welfare as paramount in Section 13 |
| Personal law | Muslim, Christian, Parsi families | Sets the starting position on guardianship and on the mother’s custody in the early years; the 1890 Act still supplies the procedure |
| Hindu Marriage Act, Section 26 | Where a matrimonial case is already pending | Lets the same court pass custody, maintenance and education orders for the child, and vary them later |
| Domestic Violence Act, Section 21 | Where a DV application is filed | Allows a Magistrate to grant temporary custody, with visitation to the other parent |
| Family Courts Act, 1984 | Delhi and everywhere a Family Court exists | Section 7 gives that court the jurisdiction; the Act also requires it to attempt settlement first |
Whichever of them brings you into the building, the deciding test does not change. Personal law and the 1956 Act tell the court where to start. Welfare tells the court where to finish. That is the reason two families of different faiths, with identical facts, generally get the same answer.
This is the single most misquoted provision in Indian family law. Section 6(a) of the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act provides that the natural guardian of a Hindu minor boy or unmarried girl is the father, and after him the mother — with the proviso that the custody of a minor who has not completed the age of five years shall ordinarily be with the mother.
Two words carry the whole thing. Ordinarily means it is the normal outcome, not an automatic one; it can be displaced where welfare requires, and Section 13 says welfare is paramount over anything else in the Act. And custody is not guardianship — the proviso is about where the very young child lives, not about who holds legal authority.
What this means in practice is that a father contesting custody of a two-year-old is arguing against a strong starting position and needs something real to displace it, while a mother relying on the proviso alone should know that it is a starting position and not the end of the matter. Neither of those is a prediction about any particular case.
The same Section 6(a) says the father is the natural guardian and “after him” the mother, and for decades that was read literally, as though a living father meant the mother could never act. In Githa Hariharan v. Reserve Bank of India, decided on 17 February 1999, the Supreme Court read “after” as meaning in the absence of — absence including indifference, or an arrangement by which the father has left the child’s affairs to the mother — so that the mother can act as the natural guardian.
Know the name of that case, because the older reading survives in offices long after it stopped being the law. It comes up when a bank wants a father’s signature on a minor’s account, when a school insists on the father for a form, and when an investment or insurance form has one box for the guardian. The judgment is the answer to all of those.
The statutes do not define welfare, deliberately, because the point of the test is that it is applied to this child rather than to children in general. From the way courts reason about it, these are the strands that recur.
Notice what is not on that list: which parent is morally better, which parent the other family disapproves of, and which parent filed first. The list is also the reason a custody matter is won quietly, months before the hearing, by the parent who has been keeping ordinary records of an ordinary life.
Section 17(3) of the Guardians and Wards Act says that if the minor is old enough to form an intelligent preference, the court may consider that preference. There is no age written into the section, because the test is capacity rather than birthdays.
How it is done matters as much as whether. Judges commonly speak to a child in chambers, without either parent present and often without the advocates, precisely so that the child is not put in the position of choosing between two people in front of both of them. A child may also be seen by a counsellor attached to the court.
Two things follow for a parent. First, it is a factor and not a vote — the court is still deciding welfare, and a clear preference from an older child carries weight without being conclusive. Second, and more important: a preference that sounds rehearsed is worth less than nothing. Judges hear a great many children and are not easily persuaded by a nine-year-old using adult vocabulary about a parent. The coaching becomes the evidence.
Parents ask for this constantly, usually having read about it elsewhere, and the honest answer has two halves.
There is no statutory scheme of joint custody in India. The Law Commission of India examined the question and recommended a framework for joint custody and shared parenting in its 257th Report, in 2015. That recommendation has not been enacted. Anybody telling you that joint custody is your right under Indian law is describing a report, not a statute.
What does exist is a very wide discretion. Because the court is directed to do what serves the child, it is not confined to a choice between two households, and orders providing for genuinely shared parenting time — substantial periods with each parent, joint decision-making on school and health, structured holidays — have been passed. Overwhelmingly, though, those arrangements arrive because the parents proposed them, not because one parent demanded them. Which is the practical point: shared parenting in India is much more available by agreement than by litigation.
Section 12 of the Guardians and Wards Act lets the court make an interim order for the custody and protection of the minor while the application is pending, and Section 26 of the Hindu Marriage Act allows the same inside a matrimonial case. In a DV proceeding, Section 21 of that Act allows a Magistrate to grant temporary custody with visitation to the other party.
Take interim orders seriously, for a reason that is rarely said out loud. Custody cases are not quick, and an arrangement that has run for a long time becomes an argument in itself — the child is settled, the routine works, disturbing it has a cost. The interim position therefore tends to exert a pull on the final one. That cuts both ways: it is why a parent who has been cut off should apply for access early rather than waiting for the main matter, and why a parent should not agree to a temporary arrangement they cannot live with on the basis that it is only temporary.
This reframing is not a slogan; it is how courts approach it, and it changes what you should ask for. In Yashita Sahu v. State of Rajasthan (2020) the Supreme Court dealt with the child’s right to the love and affection of both parents, and recognised that where physical meeting is difficult, contact can be maintained by telephone and video call. A child is entitled to a relationship with both parents unless there is a reason touching the child’s safety or welfare to limit it.
So an access application is stronger when it is framed around what the child loses than around what the parent is being denied. And it is stronger still when it is specific: a day, a time, a place of handover, a video call at a fixed hour, an arrangement for holidays. Vague orders — “reasonable access”, “as mutually convenient” — are the single largest source of repeat litigation between separated parents, because every week becomes a negotiation and every negotiation becomes a fight.
There is a name for it and courts now use it. In Vivek Singh v. Romani Singh (2017) the Supreme Court addressed parental alienation — the process by which a child in the care of one parent comes to reject the other — and treated it as a matter going to the child’s welfare rather than as an ordinary grievance between adults.
Parents who do this rarely think of it as doing it. It looks like answering the child’s questions honestly, or not hiding what happened, or letting the child decide. In the record it looks like a child who uses adult phrases, who reports events they cannot have witnessed, and who refuses contact for reasons that match one parent’s petition word for word.
If you believe the other parent is doing this, the answer is to place the pattern before the court with dates, and to ask for counselling or a structured arrangement — not to respond in kind. Two alienating parents produce a record in which neither of them looks capable of putting the child first.
A surprising proportion of contested access applications are, underneath, arguments about twenty minutes on a Sunday. The fixes are unglamorous and they work.
Parents resist this level of formality because it feels cold. It is the opposite: it takes the weekly conflict off the child and puts it into a rule. Family courts in Delhi actively encourage arrangements of this kind and have facilities intended to make contact possible where the relationship between the adults cannot support an informal handover.
In Delhi a custody or guardianship matter ordinarily goes to the Family Court. Section 7 of the Family Courts Act, 1984 gives that court jurisdiction over guardianship of the person of a minor and over custody of and access to a minor. If a matrimonial case is already running between the same parents, custody can be dealt with in that case under Section 26 of the Hindu Marriage Act. Our Family Court page explains how that court is built differently from every other court you may have seen.
The shortcut people try is a writ of habeas corpus in the High Court, on the reasoning that the child is being wrongfully detained. Occasionally that is right. Usually it is not. In Tejaswini Gaud v. Shekhar Jagdish Prasad Tewari (2019) the Supreme Court held that habeas corpus in a child custody matter is maintainable only in exceptional cases, and that the ordinary remedy lies before the guardianship court, where evidence can be led and the welfare question can actually be examined. A writ is decided on affidavits; a custody question usually cannot be. Filing the extraordinary remedy first often costs months and ends with being sent to the court you should have started in.
Where a genuine question of the child’s safety arises, or a child has been removed by somebody with no lawful right at all, the calculation is different and is for an advocate to make the same day.
New litigants find this frustrating and it is not an administrative delay. The Family Courts Act requires the court to endeavour to assist and persuade the parties to arrive at a settlement, and family courts are equipped with counsellors for exactly that. In a custody matter the reason is more specific: a child does not benefit from an adversarial finding about their parents, and an arrangement both parents have agreed to is one both parents are likely to follow.
Use it properly rather than sitting through it. Go with a written proposal — days, times, holidays, decisions, contact — rather than with a position. Take the counsellor seriously even if you believe the other side will not. And understand the asymmetry: if mediation works you have an arrangement now, and if it fails you have lost very little, while having demonstrated that you came with a workable proposal. That is a good position to be in when the matter is argued.
Yes, and it is usually the better outcome — but be clear about what an agreement is and is not. A private arrangement between parents does not take away the court’s jurisdiction over the child, because that jurisdiction exists for the child’s benefit and not for the parents’. A court can always be asked to look again at whether an arrangement is serving the child, and the welfare test applies to what the parents wrote just as it applies to everything else.
What an agreement does is different and still valuable. A specific, workable, reasonable arrangement demonstrates that both parents can put the child first, and courts give it real weight. Having it recorded by the court converts it into something with teeth. And, less obviously, writing it down forces the fifteen practical decisions that otherwise get fought over one at a time for years.
What an agreement cannot do is bargain away the child’s entitlements — an arrangement by which one parent gives up all contact in exchange for being released from supporting the child is not a bargain the court is bound by, in either direction.
Most plans fail because they are short. Vagueness is not generosity; it is a promise of future argument. A plan worth writing covers all of this.
| Head | What to settle in writing |
|---|---|
| Living arrangement | Where the child lives, and the regular pattern of time with each parent — named days, not “as convenient” |
| Handover | Place, time, who does the travelling, what happens if somebody is late or the child is ill |
| School | Which school, who pays what, who attends meetings, who signs forms, who the school contacts first |
| Health | Routine decisions, emergency decisions, who is informed and how quickly |
| Festivals and holidays | Named individually, including birthdays — the child’s and each parent’s — and school vacations |
| Contact between visits | Calls or video at a fixed time, and a rule that neither parent listens in or hurries them |
| Travel | Notice before taking the child out of the city, and what is required before any travel abroad |
| Information | School reports, medical reports and any change of address or phone number shared within a fixed number of days |
| Review | How and when the plan is revisited as the child grows, and how a change is proposed |
| Disagreement | What the parents do before either of them files anything — the counsellor, a mediator, a cooling period |
None of that is legal drafting. It is thinking done in advance by the two people best placed to do it, at the one moment when they are both willing to. We draft these as a written arrangement when both parents are negotiating; where a wider family settlement is involved, a family settlement agreement may be the vehicle. Whether to have the terms recorded by the court is a question for your advocate, and the answer is usually yes.
Parents fuse these two and the fusion damages both. Custody is about where the child lives. Maintenance is about the child being supported, and it is owed regardless of which parent the child lives with. A parent is not entitled to withhold contact because support has not been paid, and a parent is not entitled to withhold support because contact has been refused. Courts say this repeatedly and litigants keep doing it.
The framework for maintenance — who can claim, under which provision, and how an order is enforced — is set out on our maintenance page, and within a DV proceeding on the domestic violence page. Where income has to be proved or answered, the income affidavit is usually where it starts. This page prints no figures and no formula for the same reason it prints no timelines: they are decided case by case and anything printed here would be wrong for most readers.
A large share of post-separation disputes are conducted entirely through institutions, and school is the commonest battleground: a parent removed as the contact, a transfer done without telling the other, a name changed on the record, a parent refused the report card.
The practical points are these. A parent does not lose their standing with the school merely because the child lives with the other parent, and a court order dealing with school information is an ordinary thing to ask for. Moving a child’s school during a pending matter, without consent or leave, is treated seriously and is a common own goal. And where records are wrong — a misspelt name, a wrong parent’s name, a date that does not match the birth certificate — correct them through the proper route rather than in the middle of a dispute, because our page on correcting educational documents exists precisely because these corrections are slow and are needed at the worst moment.
Passport and travel questions for a minor are where an ordinary dispute becomes urgent, because what happens can be very hard to undo.
A minor’s passport application ordinarily engages both parents, and the passport authority has its own procedure for cases where one parent’s consent is unavailable or where custody is in dispute — including a route that requires a court order. Where a guardianship or custody matter is pending, the court has control: it can require its permission before the child travels, direct that a passport be deposited, or impose conditions on any trip.
This is a specialist matter and this page will not pretend otherwise. Two facts set the frame. India is not a party to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. And in Nithya Anand Raghavan v. State (NCT of Delhi) (2017) the Supreme Court held that an order of a foreign court is one of the factors to be taken into account and is not binding on an Indian court — the welfare of the child remains paramount, and the court may decide the matter itself or order return, depending on what serves the child.
What follows for a parent is narrow and important: do not take a step, or sign anything, on the strength of what a foreign court order appears to require, and do not assume an Indian order will be enforced abroad as a matter of course. Engage somebody who has run one of these matters before, and do it before anybody buys a ticket.
An order that is ignored is the commonest complaint on this subject, and the response people reach for is almost always the wrong one.
A parent who is refused the child at the gate will often go straight to a police station, and it is worth saying plainly how that tends to end. A dispute between two parents about compliance with a court’s order is for that court. The police have no power to decide who should have custody, and an officer faced with two parents and one child will ordinarily do nothing beyond recording the complaint.
The legal position on taking a child from lawful guardianship exists — it is dealt with in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, as it was in the Penal Code before it — but it is aimed at removal by somebody without a right to the child, and a parent’s case is rarely made better by turning a custody matter into a criminal one. What it reliably does is harden the dispute, add a proceeding, and hand the other side something to say about your judgment.
The genuine exceptions are real and they should not be blurred: a child taken by somebody with no lawful right at all, or an immediate fear for the child’s safety. Those are for an advocate to assess on the day. Our FIR page explains what a police station can and cannot do, and our domestic violence page covers the protection route where violence is part of the picture.
There is no separate statutory visitation right for grandparents in India of the kind some other systems have. What there is, is the same welfare jurisdiction, available on an application under the Guardians and Wards Act — and courts have accepted that continuing contact with a grandparent who has been a real part of a child’s life can serve the child’s welfare, particularly where a parent has died, is abroad, or is out of the picture.
Two practical notes. The application succeeds on what it shows about the child, not on the relationship’s title — the grandparent who did the school run for four years is in a different position from the grandparent who is asking on principle. And a grandparent should be careful about being used as a proxy in a fight between the parents, because that is usually visible from the papers and it damages the child’s actual interest along with the application.
The welfare test does not change and the machinery of the 1890 Act does not change. What changes is the record, and these disputes are fought through records more than most. The birth certificate, the school admission form, the hospital file and whatever was written on them years ago all become exhibits. Where an entry is wrong or incomplete, correcting it is slow, and it is far better done now than in the middle of a hearing.
Financial responsibility for a child does not depend on the parents having been married, and is a separate question from who the child lives with. Where paternity itself is in issue, that is a distinct proceeding with its own law, and it is not something to approach without advice.
Marrying somebody does not make you the guardian of their child, and living with a child for years does not by itself create legal authority over them. That distinction surfaces at the worst moments — a hospital, a school form, a passport counter.
Adoption is a different thing altogether and it changes status rather than arrangements: a validly adopted child is the child of the adoptive parents in law. It is governed by its own statutory framework, with conditions about who may give and take in adoption and what consents are needed, and it is not a route for resolving a custody dispute between two living parents. Where a family is documenting an arrangement, our adoption deed page explains what that document does and, equally important, what it does not do. If the object is to give a step-parent authority for practical purposes, ask an advocate what instrument actually achieves that, because the common assumption is usually wrong.
Where a child has a disability, a chronic condition or particular educational needs, the welfare test does not get harder — it gets more concrete, and that is an advantage to whichever parent has actually been doing the work. Therapy appointments, school support arrangements, medical follow-up, the equipment at home and who has been organising all of it become the substance of the case rather than the background to it.
Two things are worth doing early. Put the child’s needs into a single written document — diagnosis-neutral, practical, what the child needs on a normal week — because the arrangement has to be built around it. And deal with any certificate or record the child is entitled to through the proper channel; our page on a disability certificate exists because these papers unlock school and scheme entitlements and take time to obtain.
| Helps | Backfires |
|---|---|
| School reports, attendance records, fee receipts over time | Recordings of the child saying anything about a parent |
| Medical file, vaccination card, prescriptions, appointment records | Screenshots of arguments between the adults |
| A dated contact diary kept unemotionally | Long accounts of the marriage and the in-laws |
| Messages showing you kept the other parent informed | Messages you sent in temper, which arrive as a set |
| The child’s written routine, and who does which part of it | Social media posts about the case or the other parent |
| Evidence you offered contact and it was refused | Evidence gathered by following or watching the other parent |
The pattern is not subtle. The left column is about the child and is produced by third parties. The right column is about the adults and is produced by the litigant. A parent who hands over a thick file of the second kind has told the court something about themselves that no submission can undo.
Two honest things, neither of which helps us sell anything.
The first is that a court cannot give you the arrangement you had before. It can decide where a child lives and when the other parent sees them, and it can enforce that. It cannot produce a co-parent who answers the phone pleasantly, and it cannot restore what the separation cost the child. Parents who go in expecting an outcome that undoes the past are disappointed by even a good order.
The second is that contested custody litigation is slow and it is conducted in front of the child, whatever anybody intends. Children register the tension, the missed handovers and the changed weekends even when nothing is said to them. That is the whole reason this page pushes so hard towards a written arrangement: not because agreement is noble, but because it is faster, it is cheaper, it is more durable, and the child pays a far smaller price for it.
There is a third thing, which belongs here rather than in the marketing. If what you need is contact, a settled routine and to stop being excluded from decisions, say that — and say it early, to a mediator. A very large number of these matters are fought to the end for an outcome that was available in the first month.
The child’s birth certificate. School records — admission form, report cards, attendance, fee receipts, and the name and address of the school. The medical file, including the vaccination record and anything about a continuing condition or therapy. Proof of the child’s address over time. Your own identity and address proof, and the other parent’s details as far as you have them. The marriage certificate, and any order already passed in any proceeding between you — matrimonial, maintenance, domestic violence or otherwise, with dates. The contact diary described above. And a plain written account of the child’s routine.
Several of those will have to be sworn, so plan a trip to an oath commissioner into the timetable rather than discovering it on the morning of filing — the affidavit is the thing everybody leaves last and the counter asks for first. Take a certified copy of every order as it is passed rather than collecting them in a batch a year later, and have anything not in English or Hindi translated before it goes anywhere near the file.
Documents, and nothing beyond them. Nobody here is an advocate, nobody appears before any court, nobody speaks to a school, a police station or the other parent on your behalf, and nobody here can obtain custody or access — there is no such service and anybody offering one is selling comfort to a frightened parent. What we do is the petition and its annexures typed to your advocate’s instructions, the applications — interim custody, access, permission to travel, modification of an arrangement — the reply where something has been filed against you, the affidavits and their attestation, the income affidavit where support is in issue, a written parenting arrangement where both parents are negotiating, a legal notice where your advocate settles that one is needed, certified copies, translations, and the appeal papers later on.
Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. The directory is free to open and free to write through, it runs A to Z, and no listing on it was bought.
Ask for legal aid, and ask before the first date rather than after three of them. Free legal services under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 exist for people who cannot pay, there is a legal services desk at the court complexes, and a matter concerning a child is exactly the kind of matter the system was built for. A parent who stays out of court because of money loses by default, and default is the one outcome nobody can appeal against usefully.
Two further things worth knowing. The entitlement is assessed on categories and income limits that are set by the authority and are revised, so this page does not print a figure that would be out of date within a year — ask at the desk. And mediation at the court is part of the court’s own process, which makes the cheapest route to a workable arrangement also the one the court wants you to try.
Open any service page and that document’s price is on it, before you order and before you speak to anybody. Anything payable to a court, an oath commissioner or a government office is shown apart from our figure, because it is not our money.
You hear the whole figure before work begins and nothing is taken in advance. And on this page the useful thing is not the price but the advice that costs us work: the least expensive custody matter is the one that ends in a written arrangement. A parenting plan drafted properly, and recorded by the court, costs a fraction of a contested case and takes a fraction of the time — and the child pays none of the price that the contested version charges. If that route is open to you, take it. If it is not, tell us the ages of the children and the date of any order already passed, because those two facts decide what has to be prepared first.
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Those two facts decide almost everything about what has to be prepared and in what order — whether an interim application comes first, whether a written parenting arrangement is realistic, and what the file is missing. Send whatever orders and papers you already have. We will tell you what a complete set looks like and where yours falls short, and put the directory in front of you. We will not tell you that an outcome can be arranged, because it cannot be, and anybody saying otherwise is taking money from a parent at the worst moment. Searching the directory is free and no commission from anybody on it reaches us.
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