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Recently I have had more than one person ask me about establishing paternity and doing a name change after a father has passed away. There is an automatic presumption of paternity for children who are born during a marriage. However, the number of ...

In the past 12 months, my office has represented three different Husbands each going through their own Texas divorce who all had cases in which their wife has had a child with another man. The facts of each case have varied in some of the cases the ...

The law in the state of Texas is that a man is legally presumed to be the father of any child that is born to his wife either during the course of their marriage or before the 301 st day after the marriage ends. The most common reasons that a ...

The nuclear family of the 1950s is no longer the norm in the United States if it ever was in the first place. In today’s world non-parents (including Grandparents) play larger roles in their family’s lives than in previous generations when parents ...

Many people are under the mistaken belief that the law gives mothers more rights than fathers in Texas. However, that is no longer the case. The new standard for determining rights to children is "Best Interest of the child." Under this standard in ...

If it is unknown who the biological father of your child is, a paternity suit may be filed in order to make a legal determination of parentage. The reason that this type of family lawsuit may be filed is to not only create a legal relationship ...

If you are not sure that you are the biological father to a child (or if the child’s mother is not sure) then neither of you should sign an Acknowledgment of Paternity . You and your child’s mother should make plans for you to get a genetic test in ...

Anyone who has gone through a pregnancy, whether you are a mother or father, can understand the difficulties and stresses associated with the nine month wait for a baby to be delivered. Mothers understand the physical pain that goes along with the ...

Many times you will hear about divorce in connection with family law cases in Texas . I will say that the majority of people that walk through the door of the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC are interested in discussing a divorce with us, but there ...

A scenario that a potential client recently presented to our office involved a mother wanting to add the father of her child to his birth certificate. The complicating factor was that the father is now deceased. When a woman and a man have a child ...

I get questions frequently from clients and potential clients regarding a wide range of subjects. I hear a lot of interesting things, but normally the questions do not cause me to do any mental gymnastics. However, I recently had a consult with a ...

Recently, a friend and fellow attorney asked me some questions regarding one of his cases. He was representing the husband in a divorce case . The facts were a little unusual in that they had competing divorce cases. The wife was living in Texas and ...

A benefit of being one of the attorneys working at the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC is that I have the opportunity to meet with many in our community to talk to them about their problems and to see if our office can help the potential client and ...

There are a number of circumstances in which a parent, guardian or other conservator of a child may want the child's last name to be changed. At minimum, a request to change a child's name must state the reason why the child's name should be changed, ...

It is a weekly if not a daily occurrence that fathers reach out to us to find out what their rights are in Texas in regards to their children. In the state of Texas, family law protects a father’s paternal rights to his children. If a couple has ...

In yesterday’s blog post from the Law Office of Bryan Fagan, PLLC , we introduced our topic of child support cases from the noncustodial parent’s perspective. You are the non-custodial parent if your child does not primarily reside with you and ...

As it sometimes happens in Texas Child Protective Services cases, the child involved in the case will not have a legally established father. Obviously, the child has a biological father but in the state parental registry there is no man listed as ...

The word paternity , simply put, means the legal determination of who the father of a child is. Being the biological father of a child is the first step towards becoming the legal father to a child, but without a determination, as to who is a child's ...

If you are a mother reading this blog post and are questioning who is the biological father of your child it is likely that you have thought more than once about how much you wish you did not have to deal with this subject. I get it. As a father and ...

In Texas, the Office of the Attorney General oversees the payment of child support . It is likely that if you already have a child support order in place, you are mandated to send those payments through the Office of the Attorney General. If you do ...

In the event that you and your spouse are getting a divorce and you are not represented by an attorney then today’s blog post should be helpful to you. In most divorce decrees a parenting plan will be included which contains the vast majority of the ...

Military parents have a great deal on their minds, both before setting off for deployment and while overseas. If you count yourself among those people who serve in our armed forces I would like to first thank you for making that sacrifice for all us ...

The title to today’s blog post may have caught some of you by surprise. Most folks don’t think that they are interviewing attorneys when they find themselves wanting to start a family law case. I get the impression that a majority of people go into ...

Receiving a court summons-What should you do? One minute you are minding your own business and the next you have been handed some paper from a person you’ve never met before that instructs you to head to a courthouse on a date in the near future to ...

There is more than one way to skin a cat and there is more than one way to establish paternity in Texas. Let’s start off today’s blog post by going through each of the three options. As an aside, I will be writing about each method from the vantage ...

This year I have had several consults in which the wives I have met with have brought up how their husbands are not the father of one of their children. In many of these consults, the women were surprised to learn that this would somehow complicate ...

Surrogates are women who carry children for a family who are unable to conceive a child themselves. With the legalization of same sex marriages across the United States as well as the continuing need for helping spouses in traditional marriages ...

For the past couple days we have discussed paternity issues on our blog. An important document that is related to paternity is an Acknowledgment of Paternity (AOP). This is the form that you and your child’s mother can formally declare you to be the ...