The first step, or the co-first step, to getting through the nightmare of family law is to research your judge.
Every state should allow you to disqualify a judge before they rule on something in your case. In Washington, that’s governed by a statute, RCW 4.12.040, and RCW 4.12.050 has the procedure to follow to disqualify the judge. If you’re not in the Evergreen State lookup Washington’s statute, then do a search for the same type of language in your state’s codes.
After you understand the disqualification of a judge, start researching who your judge is. Deep searches are essential. Any names of other lawyers that you discover in your search, you want to do deep searches on them as well. Judges are required to disclose who contributes to their election campaigns. You want to look up all the contributors to their campaign, and determine who those contributors are. Unethical bad-apple divorce attorneys will often contribute to the campaigns of the judges they like, and their children will contribute to the judge’s campaign, and their paralegal will contribute, etc.
You want to know what your judge did for a career before they ascended to the bench. If they were a family law lawyer that’s good in that they at least understand the system, but could be bad because they may have drank the ‘kool aid’ that there’s nothing wrong with the system, or they might have even been one of the unethical high-conflict bad apple lawyers.
The point is that you want to know everything you can about the judge.
Who they are, who their spouse is, what political candidates they contributed to, who contributed to their election campaigns, what their previous career was, everything. If you have the money, you might even want to hire a private investigator.
In my family law case, I did some research on my judge but not enough. I knew that she was a former prosecutor, but didn’t recognize how much of a problem it was that she had no family law experience or had only been a judge for 12 weeks before getting my case.
Judges often learn how to be a judge in family law. It’s a disastrous idea that we put new judges in family law because it’s such a difficult area of law, but that’s what happens.
And just like it takes 5 years to really learn how to drive, be a lawyer, carpenter, waitress, or whatever, it takes 5 years to learn how to be a judge.
Now read how to research opposing counsel, and apply those techniques to researching your judge.
Judges have a code of conduct like lawyers. You should read those as well. Here is a link to the Washington Code of Judicial Conduct, you should do a search for your state’s judicial rules and read them.
https://www.courts.wa.gov/court_rules/?fa=court_rules.list&group=ga&set=CJC
Research who has contributed to your judges election campaign. Here’s a link to the Washington site to research contributions to judges. Look at it, then do a search for your state’s.
https://www.pdc.wa.gov/browse/more-ways-to-follow-the-money/candidates/judicial?category=Candidates