Child Custody
Child Custody
Thoughtful guidance on time-sharing, parental responsibility, and parenting plans tailored to your family.
What the court is really asking.
Florida custody law is animated by a single question: what arrangement best serves this child? The statute does not begin with the parents' preferences or the rhythms of their working lives. It begins with the child's stability, education, healthcare, and emotional well-being, and works outward from there.
That orientation shapes every conversation in the case. The firm's role is to help a parent translate the realities of their household into the legal categories the court recognizes — and to advocate for a plan that the child can actually live inside.
Time-sharing, parental responsibility, and the parenting plan.
Florida law separates two related but distinct ideas. Time-sharing governs the schedule — when the child is with each parent, including weekdays, weekends, holidays, and school breaks. Parental responsibility governs decision-making — who has authority over education, healthcare, religious upbringing, and other significant matters in the child's life.
The parenting plan is the document that brings both together. A well-drafted plan anticipates the questions a family will face years after the case is closed: how exchanges happen, how disagreements are resolved, how new information is shared. Vague plans become future litigation; clear plans quietly disappear into ordinary life.
How the court weighs the best-interest analysis.
Section 61.13 of the Florida Statutes lists more than twenty factors the court considers when crafting or approving a time-sharing arrangement. They include each parent's capacity to put the child's needs first, the geographic viability of the proposed schedule, the moral fitness of each parent, and the reasonable preferences of a sufficiently mature child.
No single factor decides the case. The court weighs them as a whole, looking for the arrangement most likely to support the child's continuing relationship with both parents. Knowing how those factors are presented — and which evidence the court actually finds persuasive — is part of what experienced counsel brings to the work.
When circumstances change, the order can change with them.
A parenting plan reflects the family at a moment in time. Children grow, jobs relocate, schools change, and what served a five-year-old may not serve a fifteen-year-old. Florida law permits modification when there has been a substantial, material, and unanticipated change in circumstances and modification is in the child's best interest.
When an existing order is not being honored, the court has meaningful tools to enforce it — make-up time-sharing, contempt, attorney's fees, and in serious cases, modification of the underlying plan. The firm helps clients pursue these remedies with proportion: firm where firmness is warranted, restrained where the relationship between parents is worth preserving.
A parenting plan is not a victory or a concession — it is the framework a child will live inside for years. It deserves to be built with care.
Sound counsel narrows disputes — it does not invent them.
Parents sometimes hesitate to involve a lawyer in a custody matter, worried that doing so will harden a workable conversation into a contested one. Experience suggests the opposite. Early counsel surfaces the issues that need to be addressed, frames them in the language the court actually uses, and quietly removes the procedural pitfalls that can otherwise derail a settlement.
Working with the firm means working directly with Gabrielle from the first conversation through the final order. The work is unhurried, deeply informed by Florida law, and grounded in the understanding that a parenting plan is, ultimately, a framework for a childhood.
Begin with a conversation, not a courtroom.
Most custody matters begin long before a petition is filed — in the quiet recognition that a parenting arrangement needs to be put on paper, or that an existing one is no longer working. The right first step is rarely a courtroom; it is an honest conversation with experienced counsel.
Initial consultations are confidential and conducted personally by Gabrielle. You will leave with a clearer view of how Florida law applies to your family, what realistic outcomes look like, and what the next steps could be — whether quietly negotiated or, if necessary, advocated in court.