66 Times Family Feuds Shocked Lawyers When People Actually Brought Their Petty Fights To Court

My parents got divorced a year or so ago. During the mediation my dad refused to let my brother get his license to drive himself and our youngest brother to school. Instead it was agreed that I would take them to school during the weeks they were with my mom (every other week), which I wasn't thrilled about because they're school is 25 miles away from my mom's house.

My dad then demanded that he would only agree if it was added that I have a medical substances card and I was not "allowed" to smoke the day before or day of driving them.

My mom's lawyer promptly had that removed. She said having my name associated with substances in a legal document, legal medical state or not, could possibly have a negative impact on me for life. The attorney said she was confused how it was relevant.
Real stand up guy, my pops is.

This is from a Family Court judge, who is actually now in my State's highest court:

Wife comes in pretending she can't speak any english.

She didn't know the judge spoke fluently in her ethnic language.

She was in for quite a shock when he started trying to speak to her.

He was pretty pissed at the antics.

Parents who bring kids to court so they can watch mom and dad fight.

Dude. Spare the kids.

When I was working for a family attorney during law school, one of the parties reached up her dress, pulled out her tampon, and threw it at her husband.

She may have won the argument (?) but she definitely didn't look good when the story came up during custody hearings.

I usually just lurk but I have one. SO used to tell me stories of her petty father and (awesome)mothers court battles of child support. Her mother has always had health issues but still worked hard to keep food on the table and a roof over her and her brothers head. The father would always bring the mother back to court as much as possible to get it reduced from a petty 25 dollars a week. Eventually after a few years her lawyer hired a PI and found out he was hiding a business from the courts (and state) and his child support went through the roof. Pretty sure he got in legal trouble over it as well.

I practice law - not usually family law, but I have a case of my own right now.

My grade school-aged son took an entrance exam for a gifted student program. He has been offered a spot in the program, but it will require switching to a different school (within the district) next year if he joins. The program is well regarded in town - one person whose kids went through it described it to me as a "quality private school education for free."

I have to go to court in a few weeks to argue over whether our son should join the program. His mother - who signed him up for the test, and called it the most important day of his life - has now decided he shouldn't join it. I don't know why. She's made some half-hearted arguments that he couldn't handle it, and that she'd have to do too much driving. But I suspect it's just because I'm in favor of it.

This is getting me really down - it's a great opportunity for our son, and she just...doesn't want to agree.

I have been in family law for over a decade and the most petty thing I have ever seen happen was that the wife from an affluent divorcing family had several trees planted on one side of a fence on the property and the husband wanted them planted on the other side of the exact same fence - about 5 feet from where the wife had them planted. He insisted that we file contempt against the wife for said tree plantings. They spent close to $50k in legal fees arguing over the stupid trees. It was incredulous!!! I have stories upon stories of people's pettiness but this one will always stand out for me!!!

Another REALLY petty one was a dad buying a money order for child support every month but not actually giving them to the mom. He gave us copies of all of the money orders he bought as evidence of the support he paid but she claimed she had never received them. Well that seemed stupid but no he had actually just kept them and then, like an idiot, gave the original months old money order to the mom to pay for the outstanding child support balance. He was definitely found in contempt!! People can be really ridiculous!!!

Canadian family lawyer here.

Many instances of pettiness. Generally, good family lawyers will call their client on their b******t. We don't want to be the lawyer standing in front of a judge over really petty things. Reputation is important.

Client - "My son is very mature for his age. I believe access to his mother should be per his discretion"
Me - "....your 2 year old son!?"

That said, I've had people call my office yelling that my client wouldn't allow them to pick up the infant child at 10 p.m. (only 4 hours late for a visit), one guy fire 2 previous lawyers and retain me to negotiate adding 3 meaningless words to a settlement (we're talking months of intense negotiations between counsel), one parent refuse to allow another parent to take kids on vacation because they wanted to take the child to Disney first, despite, you know, not having the funds to do so.

The most petty are the parents who phone CAS (child protection services) or the police for every minor disagreement. Your 2 year old cries when leaving your home? CALL CHILD PROTECTION SERVICES.

Family law attorney here a/k/a glorified babysitter.

Let's see:

One client said that father's visitation should be limited because his girlfriend's shirts are too low cut.

Another client was ordered to box up his wife's belongings (and some of the child's belongings) and hand it over to her (she had him arrested and moved out). When I followed up with him, he said all went smoothly - did as the Judge directed. When we get to court, opposing counsel informs the judge (with color photographs), that he boxed up garbage. Literally took garbage into stuffed each box with it. When I asked why he did that, he said "my wife only owned garbage. That's what she left behind."

Same client - who was actually the worst client I ever had - once threatened to call child protective services and allege that the mother was neglecting and mistreating their daughter. The problem was that there was a full stay-away criminal court order of protection against him (in favor of the mom and child). I told him that if CPS deems that to be true, his daughter might end up with the state. His response: then so be it. Let her go to foster care.

Same guy used to whisper "drop" every time his wife walked by us in court.

Child of Divorce and if parents would actually look out for what is best for their kids instead of trying to sabotage each other this world would be better. I hope I am never a family court judge because I would insist on crazy stuff to get my point across and all children would have a court appointed lawyer that looked out for the kids not trying to get parents to agree to a deal.

Not the most petty, but one I remember. I had a client who negotiated to keep the marital home, but had to make a 40k payment to her spouse as part of the deal.

I scheduled a meeting in my office, to be joined by my client, the adversary (ex spouse), and opposing counsel. I confirmed with her repeatedly that she was coming to the meeting, and confirmed with her repeatedly that she was bringing a bank or cashier's check for the amount, as specifically directed in the property settlement agreement.

Day comes and she's running late. We're sitting around my conference table passing time. A bunch of guys knock on the door to the conference room - they looked like they were movers, from the way they were dressed - and walk in, carrying duffel bags which they set down on my table. Lots and lots and lots of duffel bags. She had taken the money out in singles.

Opposing counsel was understandably livid. I informed my client that I would no longer be representing her.

Many people have paid me thousands of dollars to actively litigate for their spouse/ex to pay them $50 to $500. "It's a matter of principle!" Okay bud, whatever you say.

People always think that they (via the family court) will teach their former love a life lesson that will cause an epiphany and a fundamental change of that person's character, for the better. As much as I try to tell them, as many ways as I structure the message, I can never convince them that it won't work. That jerk is still a jerk, lady, even after a contempt order. He's gonna do it again, because it's in his nature.

My friend's ex had him arrested and thrown in jail, where he had to wait an entire weekend to get out. His crime? He went to their kid's daycare in order to take a picture of said kid so he could e-mail it to his mom on Mothers' Day on a non-custodial day. She's a piece of work.

My dad is a family court judge. One family, going through custody battle, was so salty the ex wife gave their son a bad haircut so that he would look bad in her ex husbands new wedding photos.

Father wanted full custody of his child. The child was in the full mother's custody. The child has diabetes. Both parents must fill a daily glucose intake measured by a glucometer. Every time the father dropped the child at the mother's place, he would buy a Snickers or Twix on the way there and feed it to the kid. Then we flipped out the glucose measurements during court. Due to the measurements being extremely high when the child was at his mom's place, we were able to get the child to the father's full custody. I didn't know what he was doing. I certainly didn't advise him to do it. He just brought it to the courthouse and ordered me to present it. Either that or that time during divorce a guy had exact knowledge of how many toilet paper sheets his wife was overusing and how many liters of warm water she overused.

In law school I did some intern work for a family law clinic. Most of my clients were pretty reasonable, but when waiting for my cases to be heard in the hearing room, I saw some really petty and terrible stuff from other parties. But one case stood out as the worst.

One guy who got custody of the family dog in the divorce, said that if he didn't get more visitation with the children he would have the dog put down. His excuse was that without the kids there, the dog wouldn't get the attention it needed and was better off gone.

The ex-wife made an impassioned plea before the judge, showing pictures of the kids playing with the dog and video testimony from the kids expressing their love for it. It was 100% clear they would be devastated if the dog was put down. While the judge was very sympathetic, and tried asking the ex-husband to be reasonable, in the end her hands were tied, since the dog was the ex-husband's property per the divorce agreement, and he was free to do whatever he wanted, provided it comported with state anti-cruelty laws.

In the end she relented to give him custody rights basically every weekend of the month in order to save the kids' dog.

To the judge's credit, she gave the ex husband a verbal haranguing like I've never seen in all my years of practicing law since. She warned him that she would be watching this case very closely and would not hesitate referring it to a criminal prosecutor if he slips up in any way either towards the treatment of the dog or the kids. And that if anything happens to that dog, she would fast track a hearing to revisit his visitation rights, and strongly implied the new visitation schedule would be vastly against his favor should that come to pass.

On that day I realized I never wanted to be a family lawyer.

Edit: tl;dr: Father threatens to put down family dog if he doesn't get weekend custody of the kids and wins custody in court.

I am an assistant to a family attorney and Jesus Christ, people are petty jerks. Both Men and Women equally, by the way.

I would say the most frequent is not allowing the other parent to take the kids to Disneyland or to visit their grandparents out of state. Literally going to court to prevent them from doing that.

It happens sooooooo muuuuuuuch! They don't care about whether or not the child has fun, they just want to sabotage the other parent for moving on. Some people just can't let go of their exes, even if they are the ones that left. Kids are just tools for revenge. The revenge they want is for their offspring to resent the other parent as much as they do.

I realized that family law is such a huge industry because there are so many petty jerks and all out psychos that exist. The funny thing is that these people are your friends and co-workers, you would just never know how they are with their families. Not everyone is as chill as they seem.

My divorce was nasty. He couldn't keep a job, constantly getting written up for being late for work, prior to the divorce, at one point he'd been on time 2 days in a 6 week period. I still have the write ups somewhere. He demanded alimony and for me to pay for his health insurance for the rest of his life, plus he wanted my entire retirement account. He wanted sole custody of the boys. He refused to work more than 15 hours per week stating that he couldn't find anything else. Child support for 2 kids was 300 a month. My job pays ok and I had good insurance at least but alimony would have been 900 a month and his insurance another 700 out of pocket. It was more than half of my income. We'd have been homeless under an overpass if he'd have had his way.

In the end he got 1/2 of my retirement, no alimony and no insurance. He paid 150 in child support because my oldest son told him "he didn't want his money" and then moved in with my parents (he was 18, support, in our state goes until the child's 19th birthday). So glad that's all behind me.

Got a matter at the moment.
Act for the Father. Every time the Father does something that the Mother doesn't like she withholds the children.
Mother wanted to take the children out of the school they had been since kindy and move an hour away. Father didn't agree. Father doesn't get to see them for 3 months whilst we get proceedings on foot.

Prior to that that Father hadn't agreed to some other silly demand so she witheld the children for another 3 months.

The Father is currently suffering from bowel cancer as an added bonus so whether he will pull through and how long he will have left with the children is a serious issue.

The family courts at least here in Australia are extremely slow beasts, underfunded, underresourced and getting anywhere when one parent is completely unreasonable is extremely difficult.

Parents didn't let a kid get his college education because they were fighting over who was going to pay it. This includes cosigning on the predatory loans that everyone was rushing to sign up for.

The judge asked why either one didn't bring this up 6 months earlier when they new he was starting college. Both of them gave the same answer except from their perspective, something like the other parent is to blame because they didn't tell the parent about the bills. Apparently both new about the bills and the deadlines for the previous 3 months and expected the other to pay for it. The case wasn't raised in court until after the deadline for the next semester had passed.

The kid probably was forced to take loans on his own, god only knows his situation now. The parents ended up spending the same amount as the tution each in lawyer fees just for them both to have to pay half the tution.

Never get divorced.