To help us challenge the new Massachusetts Guidelines in court, we need plaintiffs –people who are, or will be, affected by the new Guidelines who are willing to lend their names and their stories to the legal complaint.
The lawsuit cannot proceed without some good plaintiffs.
General qualifications include:
• You are currently paying child support under the new Massachusetts Guidelines, or have received notice of an upcoming action in Family Court at which time your child support order will be re-examined, or your child support order is over three years old and you strongly suspect that your ex will be taking you back to court for a child support modification in the next six months.
• You have no child support arrearage at this time.
• You have no criminal record and no criminal charges pending against you.
• You have a job, or you are receiving unemployment.
• Your child support order comes from a Massachusetts court and you currently live in or within easy driving distance of Massachusetts.
If you meet the above criteria, I would like to hear from you right away at info@fathersandfamilies.org regardless of whether you are a high earner or a low earner, never-married or divorced, currently single or re-married, employed or self-employed. You will have a chance to ask Attorney Hession any questions you may have and then decide whether to go forward or not — in other words, responding to this email is not a final commitment.
Here are a few special situations that are important:
• You are re-married with at least one new biological child (not a step-child).
• Your situation reasonably should have called for a deviation from the Guidelines, but you did not get one.
To be a plaintiff, you must be willing to have your name and situation publicly known.
If you meet these criteria, please let me know by email right away at info@fathersandfamilies.org. Please give me the following information:
• Your income.
• Your ex”s income.
• Number of children for whom you pay child support.
• Your current child support order.
• Your current marital status and whether you have children in your new marriage.
• The amount of your parenting time.
• Whether you were married to the mother of your child or not.
At this stage please DO NOT SEND ME A LONG STORY–there simply will not be enough time to read it. If you turn out to be one of the plaintiffs, I and attorney Gregory Hession will want to go into your story in detail.
Thanks for helping us fight the new Guidelines.
Together with you in the love of our children,
Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S.
Executive Director