Dear Father,
 

Please---we do not want to hear these words from YOU…it's much easier to win the first time around then to re-open your case later.

If you are presently involved in a child custody dispute (or might be involved in one in the future) we have identified information of great importance that you should have.

THIS INFORMATION WILL HELP YOU, AS A FATHER, MAKE YOUR STRONGEST CASE FOR CUSTODY. It will also directly help protect your children now and in the future. Your children will thank you one day for taking "their best interests" seriously!

First, we would like you to know how we have come to be in possession of so much important information. Over the 30-plus years of our working in the child custody field, we have become increasingly involved in cases that frequently may find their way into court. We have acted as expert witnesses, custody evaluators or consultants for hundreds of parents involved in custody disputes all over the country.

Further, as editors of a national publication on custody matters, as responders to a 24-hour "hotline" where we answer questions from professionals about our tests, and as directors of a national organization of custody experts, we continually hear from judges, attorneys, professional experts and parents who in one way or another have been caught up in custody disputes, some of them simple, but most longstanding, complex and bitter.

As a result of all of these activities, we came to gather a huge amount of information on how various psychological and legal strategies, different kinds of evidence, and types of allegations work (or fail to work), both in the courtroom as well as in out-of-court negotiations.

The following are some of our thoughts on what we have experienced. Everything discussed here is covered in our new Strategies handbook.

We were shocked at how many bright, wise, loving---indeed even "savvy"---fathers did not know the single most important fact that must be true if one is to prevail in a custody dispute. And this must be the best kept secret in the world, because even extremely intelligent, sophisticated professionals fail to make use of it. Indeed, even attorneys, who themselves as parents are caught up in custody disputes, frequently do not know how to make his single most important factor work for them.

We identified fourteen "key behaviors" that differentiate between parents who do well in custody disputes from those who do not. We consider these behaviors to be strategically critical.

We have identified what we see as the single biggest mistake a father in a custody dispute can make. And the irony here is that our own legal system actually encourages fathers to make this huge mistake.

If you are a father in a child custody dispute, you must learn to recognize (and deal with) blatantly wrong and immoral strategies that will likely be used against you. To add insult to injury, these strategies can be effective. And in our experience, many attorneys fail to help their clients deal with these tragically effective strategies, because they are more psychological than legal strategies, and attorneys are not often trained either to recognize or deal with them.

Another exceedingly important point is that too many fathers do not fully understand all the important things their attorneys should be doing for them. Simply put, many fathers do not know what they should ask for.

While on the topic of attorneys, we also discovered two important strategies that will literally "force" an attorney to do a better job for a client.

Dear Mother,