“My dad did a couple of divorce cases in his early career and had a few fun ones. I do remember one case where the mom was arguing for full custody with no visitation, under the allegation that the dad violated the child or something, but when they spoke with the child and got the doctor’s reports, it was textbook coaching. She told her kid what to say to make it sound like dad was hurting them when nothing inappropriate was going on. Needless to say, that’s what pushed the judge in favor of granting dad primary custody. The judge really chewed both of them out because the whole time, they were both just doing whatever they could to get at the other, but the judge really didn’t take too kindly to dragging the kid into their squabble.
Another one he told me about was when he was defending this poor battered woman divorcing her abusive husband. Unsurprisingly, the judge was siding with her more on the division of stuff. After all was said and done, the dude went up to my dad and basically told him he was going to track him and his family down and kill them. He ended up in jail on unrelated stuff eventually, but my dad was so spooked at the time, he made sure my mom knew what he looked like and told her if she ever saw him in public, she must avoid him and call 911. I found out about this story because my dad was creeping on the guy online because he apparently had just gotten out of jail. He doubted that after 20 odd years the guy even remembered him.
My favorite of my dad’s lawyer stories involved the husband and wife are arguing over the furniture in their house. There was a HUGE blow-up over this living chair. The wife was arguing that the chair should go to her because it matched the sofa and she was getting that. Husband argued that the chair should go to him because ‘his butt fit the chair’. My dad always called it the ‘butt fits the chair’ defense. It ended up with the judge getting fed up and auctioning the chair off. The judge asked the wife how much she would be willing to pay him for the chair. She said 10 bucks. He then asked the husband, ‘Are you willing to pay her more than 10 for the chair?’
The husband then just grumbles, ‘Fine she can have the stupid chair.’
Dad was aghast. Neither one of these people even cared about the chair, it wasn’t worth more than 10 bucks to either of them, but they just wanted to fight over it. This is why my dad said he never wants to go back to doing divorce cases because most of the ones he’s seen are usually about a bitter couple just wanting to have one more fight before parting ways.”