Practice Areas of Louisiana Divorce Attorneys Custody and Child Support

Practice Areas of Louisiana Divorce Attorneys Custody and Child Support

When a nuclear family is split apart, what was once a natural and efficient community of resources and love is fragmented into many pieces. As divorce attorneys can tell you, it can be tough to continue living life as though the family were still together. Despite this challenge, the law in Louisiana often tries to make children no worse off than if the family had stayed to together. Two main ways of doing this are through child support and child custody.

Louisiana is no different. In our state there are a multitude of rules and regulations which can be instructive to divorce attorneys regarding how children are to be properly taken care of. One of the more contentious issues, and the subject of today's article, involves the intersection of child custody and child support: that is, how is the parent with custody of the child compensated for that custody?


To begin, divorce attorneys must first establish the two basic types of child custody in Louisiana: joint custody and sole custody. As the reader might already have guessed, sole custody is when only one parent gets the child, whereas joint custody is when both parents have custody. In the event that one parent has sole custody, that does not mean that the other parent will never be able to see their child; actually, they will usually be entitled to visitation rights of some kind.

If the custodial arrangement is one of a -joint- nature then, as previously noted, both parents will have some degree of custodial control over their child. However, in these situations one parent may nonetheless be considered the -domiciliary parent.- This generally means that one of the parents officially can say that the child lives with them, while the other parent only has the child for -visits.-

Oftentimes the non-domiciliary parent will be the one who has to pay the child support. Divorce attorneys may reason this because the non-domiciliary parents are not tasked with financially supporting the child day to day, presumably because that child is not technically living with them. That said, there are ways for the non-domiciliary parent to get a -credit- against the money they owe for child support. Louisiana Revised Statute LA. Sec. 9:315.8 explains that if the non-domiciliary parent has custody of the child for more than seventy-three days, then they may be eligible for the credit. 315.8 goes on to say that a -day- must consist of more than four hours with the child. This statue also takes into account the amount of money or value the non-domiciliary parent is indirectly contributing to the domiciliary parent by having custody for the time which they have it. Divorce attorneys may justify this on the basis that if the non-domiciliary parent is offsetting costs to the domiciliary parent by having custody of the child for longer than the seventy three day period, then that offset should be recognized as a credit against the child support owed.

This above is informational only, not legal advice. Will Beaumont. New Orleans.

While there are a number of somekeyword, Will Beaumont's law practice deals with a huge number of family law issues.

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