Family Lawyer or Adoption Lawyer?

You’re ready to adopt! Congratulations! Do you need a family lawyer or an adoption lawyer? There is a real difference.

Family lawyers and adoption lawyers both deal with family issues, but their specific areas of expertise differ.

Family lawyer

Family law attorneys focus on legal issues that affect families. A family lawyer usually  handles a wide range of legal matters related to families, including divorce, child custody, child support, spousal support, prenuptial agreements, and paternity cases. They can also help with domestic violence issues and orders of protection.

Many family law firms focus on divorce in particular. This may require a special set of skills and experience, and the approach to negotiation and courtroom action may be different from the approach taken by a lawyer with a different background. If you need protection. during a divorce, this is the kind of lawyer you need.

Adoption lawyer

An adoption attorney, like Justin Heimer of Heimer Law, focuses solely on adoption. This includes many kinds of adoption, including private and agency adoptions, open and closed adoptions, stepparent adoptions, relative adoptions, and special needs adoptions. Adoption lawyers have extensive knowledge of the complexities of adoption, which can be very different from one case to another.

Adoption lawyers are not focused on custody battles. They navigate the legal procedures of adoption, ensure proper consent is obtained, and represent adoptive parents or birth parents in court. They also can provide practical and emotional support through the difficult process of finding a child to adopt, preparing for adoption, working with the birth parents, and ensuring a good start for the new adoptive family.

Your adoption lawyer can also assist with legal issues that arise during the adoption process, such as estate planning and the legal rights of extended family members. These questions may come up in other contexts of family law, but have specific ramifications in adoption. An expert adoption attorney will be familiar with the ways these matters interact with the adoption process.

Family lawyer or adoption lawyer?

You may have thought that adoption law would be a subset of family law and a family law firm would be the first choice for legal representation in an adoption. We hope that you can now see that a specialist adoption attorney will be a better choice. Contact Heimer Law to work with an expert adoption lawyer.