Family Law Article by Richard Crouch, Attorney at Law, Crouch & Crouch, 2111 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 550, Arlington, Virginia 22201; (703) 528-6700; crouch@patriot.net
This new practice book from Virginia CLE is amazingly comprehensive, approaches treatise status in its discussion of the law one needs to know in practice, and includes more useful forms than any Virginia CLE product in this field in many years. Most of the time a new lawyer has had to go to The Virginia Lawyer to get basic how-to advice about approaching a family law case, and take his or her chances on the limited offering that a practice book spanning all fields could include; this new treatise changes all that, and is a must for the new practitioner who is serious about working in this area. Its ambitious reach, thoroughness and depth of coverage make it a book that the experienced litigator, as well, will want to check with in most cases.
The author of this enormously useful volume -- one cannot honestly use a term like "manual" or "handbook" for something that is impossible to hold open in one hand and quite a job for two -- is Richard D. Balnave, a Professor at the University of Virginia Law School and recently Chairman of the Family Law Section of the Virginia State Bar. Though one might wonder how a professor knows so perfectly just what a practitioner needs to know on every point of practice, the answer is that Professor Balnave has long been the Director of the University's Family Law Clinical Program. The subjects he teaches at the law school include legal ethics and professional responsibility as well as family law and trial advocacy.
This book is honestly titled, for it is extremely well organized and orderly in its own approach to its subject. Young readers should be warned that it does not attempt to give you a "system" for organizing your family law practice for maximum profit and efficiency, but its multitudinous practice-tested Virginia forms could hardly be better organized.
This book does not, as so many learned treatises infuriatingly do, try to comprehend the entire universe of legal subjects touching upon families, bury divorce in a short chapter somewhere in the middle, and devote three pages to equitable distribution; nor does it leave the big questions about litigation bafflingly unanswered. This is a litigator's book and a litigator's tool. At those points at which local practice varies widely around the state, for instance in whether divorce cases are heard by deposition, by Commissioner or ore tenus, it recognizes the need to know, and stresses the importance of finding out about this particular point of local practice. Professor Balnave has selected the practice areas that are overwhelmingly the most important, client relations, divorce, discovery, support, property division and custody, and treated those areas very, very thoroughly. There are also chapters on pre-trial diversion (such as mediation requirements), trial preparation and trial, enforcement and modification, and domestic violence.
Practical lawyers will like the tone of this book, as it is formal without pretense and never talks down to the reader nor struggles to impress.
Being a practice book, this volume could be excused if it made no effort to set forth the substantive law. However, it makes a very conscientious effort to inform the reader of all statutory and case law that touches upon what one must do in approaching litigation step by step. It manages to employ a lean, spare and economical style that is consistent with its straightforward and no-nonsense approach to Virginia family law practice, and one way it does that is by putting all statutory and case law references in footnotes. And while these footnotes give citations, they are refreshingly free of the lengthy, superfluous and showoffy digressions one has to wade through in so many law reviews today. Needless to say, the volume comes with a forms disk.
Virginia Family Law: A Systematic Approach is available from Virginia CLE by mail (P. O. Box 4468, Charlottesville, Virginia 22905), by phone (804-979-5644) or fax (804-979-3147) or e-mail (vacle@vacle.org), or "over the counter" at one of Virginia CLE's many related seminars.
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