In this episode, Brian Walters meets with Elise Buie, founder of the Elise Buie Law Group in Washington, to discuss the differences between Texas and Washington laws regarding mothers going through the divorce process.
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Your hosts have earned a reputation as fierce and effective advocates inside and outside of the courtroom. Both partners are experienced trial attorneys who have been board-certified in family law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.
Brian Walters: Thanks for tuning into “For Better, Worse or Divorce,” our podcast where we provide you tips and insights on how to navigate divorce and child custody situations in the state of Texas and sometimes outside of it when we have guests on from outside of Texas like today. I’m Brian Walters. I’m here today with Elise Buie. She’s the founder of the Elise Buie Law Group, a family law and estate planning firm in Seattle and surrounding areas in Washington State. You have two family law podcasts which is interesting, Parenting Buie and Maximum Mom are the two, as well as a resourceful blog with some great info for parents and those recovering from a divorce. We felt like you’d be a great guest to be on the show today to discuss some frequently asked questions from our listeners and clients and just to discuss your experiences and how things are different or if they’re different in Washington state.
So briefly as a background, you and I met through a professional group of other family law and divorce lawyers in the United States and Canada, kind of have a small group of us with larger and more successful practices and we exchange ideas and thoughts and get together a couple times a year. In fact, we’re going to do that in about a week and a half and just try to run a better practice and provide better services for our clients. So give me a little bit about your background, not the boring stuff, about what law journal you were on in law school, but where you grew up, you have kids, did you do anything before this? All the interesting stuff, not the boring lawyer stuff.
Elise Buie: Okay. Well, the interesting stuff is I’m from New Orleans. I lived in New Orleans my whole life, so I’m a good Southern New Orleanian, go LSU. Was that just the best game ever? I’m also an LSU grad, so that was pretty exciting. We have six kids. We’re a blended family. I have four biological kids, two bonus daughters. So that has been an adventure to launch six children out into the world. I feel like I’ve educated the planet, so that’s kind of fun.
We also evacuated from New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, so I ended up moving a bunch, Georgia, then Minnesota, then Seattle. I’ve taken three bar exams, so I’m all geared up now. I think I should take the California bar just for kicks to see how that would go. And like you said, I do live in the Pacific Northwest and so something interesting, I actually live out here on the water and so often I get interrupted by sea lions on things. So when people send me podcast things like, “Keep your dogs quiet,” I’m like, “I do not know how to keep the sea lions quiet.” So if we hear barking, it is the sea lions, not my dogs.
Brian Walters: Makes sense. Different kind of pets for sure.
Elise Buie: Exactly.
Brian Walters: If you’re not already, you’re probably thinking about sun and warmth this time of the year up there. My brother lives in Portland, Oregon, so it’s a similar concept. And this is about the time of the year where they start wondering about traveling to places with sun.
Elise Buie: Absolutely.
Brian Walters: But you have much, much better summers than we have in Texas, so that’s probably a fair trade as you know from being in New Orleans for many summers.
Elise Buie: Oh yeah, those summers are hot. I felt like we had to live in the swimming pool, either the swimming pool or the AC. There was nothing in between.
Brian Walters: Yeah, I don’t know how my ancestors survived. They were in South Texas prior to air conditioning, but somehow they did, tougher people back then.
Elise Buie: Absolutely.
Brian Walters: Well, you have two podcasts, not one, which is an interesting idea. And it sounds like just based on the names, it lets you focus on different topics or different issues. So tell us about those two podcasts and what they’re about and when you started them, how long you’ve been doing them, those kind of interesting things.
Elise Buie: Well, the Maximum Mom Podcast, to be honest, I think it started in 2020. It was pandemic-related in the sense of there were so many women that I was meeting and interacting with who were struggling with the idea of being a mom, being an attorney and being an entrepreneur. I look at that as the total trifecta. It is intense to do all three and anybody who thinks those three jobs together are easy to pull off, hasn’t tried any one of them. So it is kind of a wild ride. And I think as a mom of many, it was becoming really obvious to me how many moms were struggling with the dynamic of dealing with the different cycles of their life. When you have young babies, it looks very different than when you have elementary age children, high school, college. It’s all a cycle.
And I think just having some really frank conversations with moms about what that looked like and how you could do it successfully really has spurred me on with the Maximum Mom Podcast to just bring reality, but also just authentic, the real life stuff that what we’re dealing with is really hard and we can’t accomplish everything in a week, though we’re all pretty Type A as attorneys, we’re trying to do all the things. Sometimes if you have a child who is maybe struggling in school and you’re fighting with an IEP team and you’re doing all the things you need to do as Supermom, maybe you’re not going to be super law firm owner that week or that month or that quarter, but being real about that. The “Maximum Mom Podcast” is truly one of my favorite times of the week to just connect with other people who have gone through this.
And interestingly out of the Maximum Mom Podcast kind of came the idea of the Parenting Buie Podcast, which more is focused on how to do this job as a parent more successfully, ideally to keep you out of my office and away from divorce. I became really interested in Fair Play, which is a book and card game written by a Harvard educated lawyer named Eve Rodsky. And Fair Play literally brings an operating system into your home. Just like we all have in our offices, we have systems, we have SOPs, we have all those things, but so many of us don’t have those in our most important organization, which is our home and Fair Play literally has revolutionized my life, but it has revolutionized so many people’s lives because it allows couples to come together, really divvy up that the labor in the home and figure out the total ownership of things.
Because the typical scenario is women do all this mental load where we are planning everything, organizing everything, researching, and then we nag our spouses to go do a few of the tasks. It’s very unproductive and it doesn’t allow for a good division of labor. So Parenting Buie brings out a lot of the aspects of Fair Play and really hoping to keep people away from divorce. I’d love to go out of the divorce business because we just don’t have any here in Washington. That hasn’t happened yet, but I can still be helpful.
Brian Walters: For sure. And you also have a blog as I understand it. So what do you cover in that or is that pretty broad?
Elise Buie: It is pretty broad. We really try to answer, probably like you do, a lot of frequently asked questions and a lot of things that people are interested in. One of my favorite blog posts is from a long time ago. Like I said, we have six children and so typical kids in college looking for money. And I was like, “I’m not giving you money for nothing.” I’m like, “You can blog for your beers.” And so my kids started blogging things about life in a blended family and life with a stepdad and going through divorce. And so one of the blogs is from my oldest son talking about what it was like to be raised in a home with a stepdad. And every time I read that, it’s so profound to me and it makes me appreciate my husband who has been an amazing stepfather to these kids. So our blog is a mix of things.
Brian Walters: Interesting. That’s really from the kids’ perspective when they’re grown, that’s important. I know judges are focused on that. Let’s make this easy on the kids, but I think it’s difficult for us as parents, and I’m a parent too, and lawyers to really understand what that means. So that’s quite the concept. All right. Well, let’s talk a little bit about focus on women and motherhood and if you’re going through a divorce, if you get to that point or a child custody dispute, whether that’s because you’re not married to the dad or because you’re further litigation five years post-divorce, there’s a problem that comes up. So are there certain misconceptions or stereotypes that you find that a lot of moms or women come into your office about the court system or do you think most of them have a pretty good sense of things?
Elise Buie: I would say there’s actually a fair amount of misconception, but it’s mostly in my mind around the money piece of, they’ll say things like, “Well, I’m going to keep the house and I’ll be able to keep the house.” And I’m thinking, “Well, we live in a community property state, so you can’t necessarily keep the house if there’s not other funds to be able to buy out your partner or come up with some other creative solution.” And I think even more to the point is the question of should you keep the house? I think so many people come in with this idea, or at least they verbalize this, I definitely call people out on it pretty regularly. They’re like, “Well, the kids won’t be able to function if they have to move.” And I’m like, “Really? You actually think your kids can’t handle a move to a different home?”
Because that has not been my experience. Kids are pretty resilient. They’re able to move. Yeah, they want to decorate their room and do fun things, but with enough creativity and the right attitude, kids can move pretty easily. And if keeping the house is going to make you really cash poor, you have to question whether that’s the right move and really digging in. And so I think one of the things I spend a lot of time with is helping women in particular really get to understand and not just understand, but know their finances and know how to pull the levers to make their finances work for them. And so a lot of times I feel like there’s education that goes into that. There’s meeting with maybe a financial neutral, somebody who specializes in divorce like a CDFA and really helping people get comfortable with their numbers.
Because I think as a mom and somebody who did go through divorce and was facing this single parenting looking at four kids, it’s why I started my law firm because I was like, “I got kids that are growing up and they got to go to college.” I like, “Looks like I’m paying for college.” So that was a big deal to me to be able to figure out how am I going to fund these kids all to go to school. But I had to really learn my numbers and I find a lot of women are in that same boat. And now I find the numbers are kind of fun and I compete with myself all the time about can I pull this lever and increase this 5%, 7%? What can I do? And so helping people see the fun in numbers is an important aspect, I think, of working with women through divorce or even post-divorce depending on what kind of help they might have gotten initially.
Brian Walters: Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense to me. So one of the things I like to talk about with other lawyers from other states is how things are done in other states because we are, in Texas, very distinct in certain ways. Now first of all, I think there’s a lot of similarities for one thing is, I heard you say this, Washington’s a community property state, which as is Texas. Is that correct? Did I hear that right?
Elise Buie: Yes. Actually all the states I’m barred in are community property; Louisiana, Minnesota.
Brian Walters: And I think that the basic concepts of it are probably even in states that aren’t necessarily “community property” are probably pretty broad concepts. And I think we probably all have little differences about this tweak and that issue or this type of thing. I’ve talked with California lawyers a bunch for example, and there’s different ways that they handle what we call reimbursement claims or waste claims, but they’re basically the same concept of it. But one of the big differences, we have two big differences, I think, in Texas. So I want to get your input on how these things work in Washington. One is that we technically don’t have alimony, but we have something called spousal maintenance, which is a very far cry from what most states have as alimony, number one. And number two, we allow juries if one side wants to make custody decisions, not judges, and those tend to be very different than other states. So you want to tell me a little bit about how alimony works in Washington, if you have it, and how custody determinations are made, which I suspect to be contrast with us.
Elise Buie: Yeah, definitely. We also, like you, have what’s called spousal maintenance, but it’s a pretty robust thing I would say here in Washington. It’s an equitable principle. Interestingly, it’s not statutory, but it’s an equitable principle where we always ask the first question, does one spouse have a need and does the other spouse have an ability to pay? And then we look at the principles of how long the parties have been married and we look at a short-term marriage, which is like five years or shorter, a midterm marriage, which is usually about six years to about 25 years, and then a long-term marriage, which would be post 25 years. And those lengths of marriage really determine at least the range of what we’re looking at for the length of spousal maintenance. In our jurisdiction, usually short-term marriages, we look to put people back to their position prior to marriage. So we’re looking backwards.
Midterm marriages, we really look to, usually it’s about one year of spousal maintenance for every three to five years of marriage. And it’s more rehabilitative. It’s like what can we do to get the spouses on par so they can both be maximizing their financial life moving forward? And then when we’re looking to permanent spousal maintenance in that post 25 year marriage, we really are looking to put the spouses in the same financial position till the day they die, been married more than 25 years. And the court really looks to that. And so there’s always exceptions though, as every good lawyer, how we always answer all questions, it depends.
So if I have a client who comes in and they’re married 28 years, I am definitely not going to tell them, “Of course you’re going to have permanent spousal maintenance. No doubt about it, no questions asked. Don’t even worry. Why don’t you go to the Caribbean for the next six months because it’s all good.” No, we’re first going to ask the need question and the ability to pay. And so there’s factors that can preclude things. If there is no money, we can’t squeeze dollars out of nothing. And so it just depends on many things, but it is equitable.
And the other question about juries, no, we do not have juries in child custody. Our judges here would about have a heart attack. They absolutely have all purview in the best interest of the child. We use experts often either guardian ad litems or parenting evaluators. And much of my career has been spent as a guardian ad litem doing a lot of guardian ad litem work and in a lot of exceedingly high conflict cases where we’ve had trials and I’ve been on the stand for days and days on end being cross examined.
And so it can be a very highly contentious process when we’re looking at parenting plans and coming up with a residential schedule. But as somebody who has been intimately involved in that process, when it is high conflict, I am probably one of the stronger voices in the, you do not want to go to court over your custody determination if at all possible. It is not what is in the best interest of your children, the conflict that comes with that, and anything you can do in my mind to use alternative dispute resolution or alternative dispute professionals like a parenting coordinator, a parent coach, a divorce coach, where we can keep you away from court and you can make decisions as a couple, I’m all for because it’s the conflict that harms these children, not usually the result, but it is the process that is very difficult on children.
Brian Walters: Good. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense to me for sure. Well, we’ve got some questions from listeners that are, some of them are Texas specific, but most of them are pretty broad. And, in fact, even the ones that are Texas specific, it’d probably be interesting to see if there’s a different answer that you’d have there. So let me run through a few of those and that might lead to a couple other questions. So one of the questions is how can I continue to be a stay-at-home mom for our three children after a divorce? And so this is basically an alimony question essentially, and also I’ll answer it from a Texas perspective. So the short answer is that that’s a financial question for the most part. How can you afford to do that? That’s the question. So in Texas, your options are more limited because we typically don’t have a lot of alimony. So there are cases where you might qualify for it, number one.
Number two, you might be in a position where your settlement of funds is enough that you will be able to chew into those assets over a period of time until you can get yourself back on your feet financially to enable you to do that. Let’s say you need, I don’t know, a $100,000 a year and you’ve got $300,000 in assets as part of the settlement, but no alimony. You could say, “Well, I’m going to spend three years being a stay-at-home mom and then hopefully be by year four in a position to continue to do that either through remarriage or employment or starting a business or something like that. So I assume the answer on your end might be a little bit different and probably revolve around alimony. Am I correct about that?
Elise Buie: It would be different in the sense. First, I would ask what is the need? And then what is the other spouse’s ability to pay? But even a deeper question is have you sat down with your soon to be ex and really talked about what it’s going to look like if you do go to work full-time and what is that going to look like for them? And obviously without knowing what we’re talking about, but if you are a stay-at-home mom and that is something that you two decided that was the best for your family, and maybe you have a husband who earns really good money and maybe him taking care of the children 50% of the time would be a real burden. And so having that conversation and talking about what makes the most sense for your family, and that is where bringing in a neutral professional, like a parenting coach, because there are many, many men in particular who I have worked with who are thrilled for their spouse to stay at home for a few years and care for the children so they can continue on whatever their career trajectory is.
But that’s a real decision you’re making and it does have financial implications. And now in the world of remote work, there’s a lot that you could do around being a stay-at-home mom. Our entire firm is remote. So I employ dozens of people who are moms who work full-time, some part-time, they decide their schedule, but it’s fully remote, so they’re able to really enjoy the best of both worlds. So I would make sure that when you’re thinking about this issue and you’re talking to professionals about this, you’re really thinking outside the box and you’re not just focused on, “Am I getting alimony, am I not? Do I have dollars?” Really looking at this from a holistic perspective because it’s a big decision for the family.
Brian Walters: A hundred percent agree. Okay, so next one is how do I hire an attorney when my spouse has control of the finances? So marriage, obviously since they’re referring to a spouse. So in Texas at least we don’t have legal separation. That’s another big difference. So even though someone splits up or they file for divorce, you’re still married. And so all income and all assets, community assets at least, but potentially even outside of those are under the court’s control and the court can divide them out. So typically what a court would do in that situation is you would need to find a lawyer that would say, “Okay, look, I won’t take a large retainer like I typically would’ve.” You’d want to identify an account. So you would say, “Look, we’ve got a savings account with $80,000 in it in both of our names that didn’t exist before the marriage and that’s been sitting there for six months.” So in that case, the court would probably say, “Okay, well you can have 40 of it. You can give some of it to your lawyer if you want to.”
Another option in Texas would be to borrow either through credit cards or friends or family with the idea that you would be able to get that refunded back to those folks that you borrowed it from, either quickly through that kind of situation or at the end of the case. So typically courts are going to try to make sure both people have access to funds, both for their living expenses, child expenses, and for attorney fees. They’re usually pretty good about that. I’m not quite as diligent about it as I’d like to see in certain courts. I think sometimes judges think if I just give a bunch of people that just filed a divorce a bunch of money, then they’re going to go a little crazy and fight and spend it, which it’s the judge’s money, it’s their money and I think they should be able to do what they want to with it. But I think that’s usually the thought process. But generally, they’re going to try to ensure a relative equality and the ability to pay an attorney. What about in Washington? How does that work?
Elise Buie: I would say it’s pretty similar and even more to the point of the court will again look to a need and ability. So immediately, we can go in on temporary orders very, very immediately and seek a payment of a certain amount of attorney’s fees, $10,000, $20,000. And if one spouse has that ability to pay or the community has that ability, the court will just order that outright and often it won’t even be part of the community where we’re going to look to divvy it up evenly later. They’ll just make sure that people have some money initially to be able to hire counsel and move forward. And same like you, if the case hasn’t been adjudicated, the money is all theirs.
And if somebody comes to us and if their both names are on any account, we would tell them like, “50% of that is yours, so feel free to take 50% out, not any more than 50%, but you’re fine to do that.” And obviously, we’d want records of when the bank account opened and all that kind of stuff. But assuming it is community property very clearly, we wouldn’t hesitate telling somebody that they could take that money out and be able to use it. And just like you, a lot of times people look to credit cards or friends and family because we as lawyers really should not be the bank of our clients. I think that brings up a lot of ethical considerations that we have to stay away from.
Brian Walters: Yeah, I agree. That’s what I tell my clients, “I want to be your lawyer, not your credit manager.” That’s a problem. You end up in that situation sometimes, but you try to avoid it. I agree with you a hundred percent on that. Okay, so two more quick ones and then we will wrap up here. So what happens in the event my spouse and I reconcile? So again, in Texas we don’t have legal separation. So in that case, you could either just drop the divorce and it’s like it never happened or you could leave it open, especially if you had an agreement and, say, try it out for three to six months. The percentage success for reconciling spouses over the long-term is not high, but it happens. And so it’s probably wise to maybe not immediately drop everything and have to start over if things don’t work out in three months, you might just say time out. But what about y’all, you might have some legal ramifications with legal separation and whatnot that we don’t have?
Elise Buie: A lot of people don’t do a legal separation here. We can file a legal separation, which would be different than a divorce, and then we can later turn that separation into a divorce. But a person who is divorcing doesn’t have to file for separation. They can stay together in the same home and just file for divorce. So I, like you, would probably talk to them about the realities of reconciliation and what that can look like. And because of the money and the timing, that becomes an issue here. We have a 90-day waiting period for which you can’t get a divorce in the first 90 days. So let’s say they reconcile on day 30, but we’re not certain about that. I’m probably not going to tell them to go drop their divorce filing. They might just hold onto it and see what happens and we’ll deal with it on the backend if there’s been some type of issue.
Because one of the main issues for us would be the date the community ends because oftentimes that date of separation is the date that we look to as the end of the community. And so there can be implications of earnings. And we live in a tech wondrous area where people get all these stock units and things and so often they’ll want to file and they’ll want their date of separation. They’ll be rabid about that date of separation because they’re about to get a half a million dollars in stock from Amazon and they do not want that part of their community. And so there’s often more to the issue than the reconciliation. So we have to oftentimes pull up that rug and look and see what are we really dealing with here.
Brian Walters: I agree. All right, one more quick question, then we’ll wrap it up. So question, so I had two DWIs before my kids were even born. Can those past mistakes be used against me? So I think the implication is in a custody case, married or not, might depend a little bit on how much before the kids were born, hopefully not while you were pregnant, but let’s assume not. Let’s assume it was five years before your kids were born and you’ve got a three and four-year-old. So something like that. So my experience with that is that in and of itself isn’t going to make you lose custody or something like that. It will be a red flag though. So the judge is going to figure that there is an alcohol problem in your history here and also judgment problems. Those are really two separate problems, although they go hand in hand often.
And so I think the court’s going to be looking at what your drinking history has been since then. Do you continue to drink? Has there been any further problems with alcohol use? Has there been any problems with judgment calls? Bad decisions that don’t necessarily involve alcohol. So red flag but I don’t think determinative if there’s nothing significant following up on it. I think our courts mostly want to believe in redemption, but with caution. It’s the old trust but verify thing from the Cold War, sort of the same thing we have. That’s a typical thought process from what I found in judges here. What about in Washington?
Elise Buie: I would agree. And it’s funny, I would’ve said the exact same sentence, the trust but verify. The only caveat I would say is if there’s any allegations of current drinking, that’s going to be a huge thing. It is going to pile on bigger than you think it’s going to pile on. So any thought of getting rid of those past things, you really must have gotten rid of it. It’s got to be only in the past because if there’s any allegation of current issues and you have a spouse who’s all into fighting, this is going to be an easy thing to be able to prove that things are still awry. If they’ve got pictures of you drinking or they’ve got text messages that are just you clearly drunk and doing things that are not great, it’s going to be an easy sell that there’s a big problem. And obviously most, I think in all jurisdictions, the best interest of the child rules the day and if a judge thinks that you are going to potentially drive drunk with a child, that is going to be a no-go.
Brian Walters: Okay. Well, very good. Well, thank you. That’s all we have for today. If you’d like what you’ve heard today, please do us a favor and leave a review. We appreciate all your feedback since it helps us better the podcast. If you’d like to reach out to Elise directly, we’ll have our contact information listed in the description. We’ll list the links to your two podcasts as well and your blog. And we can’t thank you enough for joining us. We’ll be back with another episode in a week or two. Thanks for listening.
For information about the topics covered in today’s episode and more, you can visit our website at waltersgilbreath.com. Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of For Better, Worse or Divorce, where we post new episodes every first and third Wednesday. Do you have a topic you want discussed or a question for our hosts? Email us at podcast@waltersgilbreath.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time.
Your hosts have earned a reputation as fierce and effective advocates inside and outside of the courtroom. Both partners are experienced trial attorneys who have been board-certified in family law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.
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