One recent winter evening, 35 mostly middle-aged and graying men gathered in a plush carpeted hotel conference room here. They listened intently, some taking notes, as a lawyer ticked off advice for handling a divorce:
Have a friend videotape you with the kids to prove you play with them. Don't move out of the house until you're forced to by a court. And don't let your wife goad you into revealing your strategy for winning custody of the kids.
"You should never confide in anyone who is trying to take all your money and your children," lectured the lawyer, Scott Trout.
DadsDivorce.com and DadsLaw.com feature law firms that cater to divorced fathers.
Mr. Trout is managing partner of Cordell & Cordell P.C., a domestic litigation firm that specializes in representing men -- or, as firm co-founder Joseph E. Cordell prefers, "guys."
Cordell & Cordell is among the most ambitious of a breed of law firms that has emerged to capitalize on the fathers' rights movement, which believes that courts slight men in divorce and especially in child-custody cases.
Even though laws in most states now decree that courts base such decisions on the child's "best interest," rather than giving preference to mothers, fathers' rights groups contend that outdated notions about the role of fathers in child care -- and what they see as the outsized influence of women's advocacy groups -- can still stack the deck against dads. Men, Mr. Cordell explains on his firm's Web site, need advocates to counter "influential organizations outside the mainstream of society and their insistence on women's interests to the utter exclusion of the merits of a given case."
National lawyers' associations don't track the number of family law firms that specialize by gender, but at least one father-focused firm can now be found in most of the biggest U.S. cities. Such outfits include Jeffery Leving and his Dadsrights.com Web site, in Chicago; Lang, Berman & Lebit on Long Island in New York, which hosts the "nyfathersrights.com" Web site; and Dadslaw Inc. in Orange, Calif., near Los Angeles.
To be sure, there are firms and nonprofit organizations that focus on representing women in divorce cases, particularly those involving domestic violence. They include networks such as Divorce Attorneys for Women, or DAWN, in Grand Rapids, Mich., which maintains the www.dawnforwomen.com site.
Some legal observers say firms focusing on either men or women can foster confrontation between parents, rather than negotiation of an amicable settlement. "They fuel the gender wars, which is not in the best interest of the children," says Andrew Schepard, a family law professor at Hofstra University School of Law in Hempstead, N.Y.
Mr. Cordell says it's reasonable for men to advocate for themselves: "Guys often have to work a little harder to be awarded primary custody. When you're disadvantaged, you'll continue to be so unless you do what you can to help yourself."
Mr. Cordell, 48, says his firm is not a political vehicle, even though his firm's Web site links to groups such as Washington-based American Coalition for Fathers and Children, which lobbies, for example, for laws that would require courts to adopt joint legal and physical custody of children as the presumed standard. "Our guys... don't have the time to invest in legislative or social movements," he says. "They're fighting for their families, not a cause."
Women's legal advocates scoff at the notion that men are underdogs in most divorce cases. Despite economic advances by women, men still tend to make more money, giving them greater resources to use in court. "One third of the calls we get are mothers who are desperate because the court is considering or has already given custody to an abusive father," says Kathy Rodgers, president of New York-based nonprofit Legal Momentum, which advocates for women.
Reliable national statistics on outcomes of child-custody disputes are scant. A 1997 study in the Family Law Quarterly examined appeals court cases over a span of 70 years and found that despite changes in the law, mothers and fathers have been favored roughly equally in child-custody disputes.
Mr. Cordell earned his law degree from the University of Texas in 1989 and shortly afterward started a law firm in St. Louis with his second wife, Yvonne, whom he married in 1991. (Mr. Cordell and his first wife divorced in 1983; the couple had no children and the experience wasn't a factor in his decision to represent men in divorce cases, he says. His first wife couldn't be reached for comment.)
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