We’re excited to welcome Kathryn Hogan as our guest today on the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Kathryn is a staff and education attorney on the education team at Disability Rights Texas. She’s an advocate for students with disabilities to get appropriate educational services, including foster children in psychiatric facilities who’ve been denied education by school districts. She is a graduate of Texas A&M University School of Law, a certified Educational Diagnostician, a certified principal, and has taught in Texas public schools for 14 years. 

The mission of Disability Rights Texas is to help people with disabilities understand and exercise their rights under the law, ensuring their full and equal participation in society. Kathryn helps parents of students with disabilities make sure they get an appropriate education in Texas public schools. Kathryn provides helpful information for family law attorneys for cases involving a disabled child, as well as:

• Communication best practices
• Section 504 and the education of children with disabilities
• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act-IDEA 
• ARD committees
• And more

On this episode of the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast, I speak with Jennifer Hargrave. Jennifer is Board Certified in Family Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. In addition, she is a member of the Texas Academy of Family Law Specialists, the Dallas Bar Family Law Section and Collaborative Divorce Texas. U.S. News & World Report has included her in their ranking of Best Lawyers since 2012 (2012-2020), and Texas Super Lawyers has included her in their ranking for eight years running, naming her one of the Top 50 Women Attorneys in Texas (2014). 

We chat with Jennifer about collaborative law as well as:

• The collaborative commitment process
• Goals and outcomes for the collaborative process
• Helping the client formulate their why
• Resolving parenting issues
• Crafting a final decree
• And more

We welcome Dr. John A. Zervopoulos, board-certified forensic psychologist and attorney to the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Dr. Zervopoulos assists attorneys as a consulting expert in several ways; he helps them understand mental health issues in their cases, critique the work of mental health experts, develop deposition and trial examination questions and draft briefs. He earned his J.D. from the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and his Ph.D. in Counseling-Clinical Psychology from the University of North Texas. Dr. Zervopoulos has conducted psychological evaluations, counseling, and mediation in more than 400 court-appointed forensic cases and has qualified as an expert witness in more than 100 cases. He’s also a published author.

Dr. Zervopoulos has developed a model for how family lawyers should interact with mental health experts and mental health issues. He talks about that model, as well as:

• Methods attorneys can use to determine if there really is a mental health issue that needs to be investigated
• Distinguishing between traits and disorders
• The importance of behaviors over diagnoses
• And more

This week, on the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast, we are speaking with Mary Evelyn McNamara. She is a partner at Rivers McNamara, PLLC in Austin. From the beginning of her career, Mary Evelyn knew she wanted to represent people. In order to hone her craft in family law, she became Board Certified. She is a member of the Family Law Council for the State Bar of Texas Family Law Section. 

Today we sit down with Mary Evelyn to discuss recovering attorney’s fees, as well as:

• Preparing to prove your case for attorney’s fees
• Presenting your bills without violating attorney-client privilege
• Best practices for identifying fees in interlocking cases
• Keys to recovering interim and appellate attorney’s fees
• And more

Today we welcome Julia Hatcher to the show. Julia has been practicing family law in Galveston, Texas, for over 22 years. She’s a Founder and the President of the Texas Association of Family Defense Attorneys, TAFDA, founded in 2020, which is a group of statewide attorneys whose mission is to preserve and advocate for family integrity which is guaranteed by the Texas and United States Constitutions.

We chat with Julia about: 

• TAFDA’s mission
• Parental rights and the Constitution
• How TAFDA is equipping attorneys for success in parental termination and child protection cases
• How TAFDA is affecting changes in the law to benefit families
• And more

Today we welcome Christy Bradshaw Schmidt to the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast.

Christy has been a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas since 1997. After six years of working as a Family Court Counselor in Dallas County Family Court Services, she went out on her own conducting private child custody evaluations and serving as an expert consultant for attorneys. Christy also works with attorneys and their clients to develop child-friendly parenting plans.

We chat with her about child custody evaluations and:

• Goals and outcomes in custody evaluations
• How attorneys can help their clients prepare for custody evaluations
• Money: balancing what you need with what you can afford
• Mistakes attorneys make during custody evaluations
• Challenging a custody evaluation
• And More

We’re excited to welcome Judge Marilea Lewis as our guest today on Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Judge Lewis is currently a partner at the Dallas based family law firm Duffee and Eitzen. She is board certified in family law and spent almost 25 years on the bench and has been selected as one of the best lawyers in America by Woodward White since 2013. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Baylor University. Outside of work, she’s actively involved in a wide variety of community organizations. And she’s even a certified yoga instructor.

On the show we chat with her about temporary orders hearings, as well as:

• Why temporary orders are the most significant part of many family law cases.
• How to determine where your most significant issues will be in your case.
• What your clients should and shouldn’t do when answering questions from opposing counsel.
• How to use your limited time on the stand wisely.
• Some of the common mistakes she sees lawyers making at temporary orders hearings and the three things every female attorney needs to do to get prepared for practice.
• And more

In the new Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast, host attorney, Holly Draper will take you behind the scenes to discover the latest news and trends in family law in the state of Texas.

In each episode, Holly will talk to an expert in family law. Guests will include family law attorneys, child custody evaluators, psychologists, mental health experts, financial experts, and others in the field.

Holly is excited to sit down for these engaging conversations about important topics in the field, and she is looking forward to sharing the stories with her listeners.

Whether you are a Texas family law attorney or another expert working in the field, you’ll not only learn about what these experts do, but you’ll learn how they do it, with helpful tips you can put to work in your own practice.

Enjoy!