| Area law firm goes to bat for men
January 9, 2008
Nancy Cambria - St. Louis Post DISPATCH
"Superdad35" bemoans the day his estranged wife went crazy and called 911 after he took the kids to grandma's for dinner.
"MDdivorce2007" has his wife's lover's name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, job location and "incriminating text messages." He's "done everything except to hire a private investigator to actually catch them together."
In the battlefield of divorce, there may be no better place to view the carnage of a wounded male psyche or the bitter aftermath of wedding vows gone sour, than on the forum section of DadsDivorce.com. It is a website owned and maintained by St. Louis-based Cordell & Cordell, one of the nation's leading family law firms catering to men.
Highly specialized firms for specific groups of people and cutthroat mentalities is nothing new in the world of law. But Cordell & Cordell may be one of the most successful firms when it comes to capitalizing on the Internet and, in particular, the rage behind the fathers' rights movement, sometimes dubbed "mad dads."
Backed by influential nonprofits and advocacy groups like the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, the movement has argued for years — particularly on the Internet — that family courts are biased in favor of women and that men are losing time with their children and sometimes their assets because of it.
After all, says "no-MAD" on DadsDivorce.com, "you're in for the fight of your life. If you're not prepared, you can bet the other side will rebut you right out of fatherhood and into poverty. Your children, with your current and future finances, will be out of your life forevermore."
It's a gender-bending argument that has obvious detractors.
"The notion that women are dominant in the courts and are treated generally better than men is laughable," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. "The fathers' rights groups really feed into this false sense about being taken advantage of."
The firm's founder, Joseph Cordell of Wildwood, is quick to say he is not a political activist. But he doesn't shy from controversy, nor his belief that feminists have ruled family court.
"Exacerbating things further is the feminist movement and its shrill insistence on women's interests to the utter exclusion of the underlying merits of a given case," he writes on his personal website, fathersworld.com.
"I don't want to shy away from being brutally frank," says Cordell, 49, from the basement of his West Port law firm, recently renovated into a tiny broadcasting studio. Cordell has just wrapped another segment of his weekly Dad's Divorce Live broadcast on the Web, one of the multitudes of ways the firm has reached out to men in cyberspace. This week's topic: appeals.
The broadcast will be added to a list of regular columns on the website authored by some of the firm's 30-plus attorneys, both men and women. They advise readers on everything from protecting your assets from your "STBX" (soon to be ex), to why dads should fight for custody of the dog (reason No. 1: Your dog can't be turned against you).
FANNING THE FLAMES
Cordell unapologetically fans the flames for the fathers' rights movement, arguing that men suffer because of unfair gender stereotypes both in family court and state child support collection divisions.
"We're really less involved in a movement or a political cause so much as we want to help a group who have very practical issues," says Cordell. "They don't want to spend the time in a political fight for justice."
When O'Fallon, Ill., resident Chuck Tackett's wife unexpectedly asked for a divorce earlier this year, he was attracted to Cordell & Cordell's pledge to represent the interests of fathers in court. He said he was concerned the court would automatically favor his estranged wife in any custody decisions regarding their three boys.
"I got exactly what I wanted," he said of the experience and an agreement of equal joint custody. "I could have gotten full custody, but I didn't want to put that on my boys."
WEB-SAVVY APPROACH
Cordell & Cordell's guys-only approach has successful imitators in many cities, and there are also firms catering exclusively to women. But Cordell was one of the first to intuit that men — sometimes reticent to share their feelings — embrace the Web and sites laced with arguments from the fathers' rights movement.
Moderated by the firm's full-time marketing director and six paid employees, the website, with some 200,000 posts and thousands of daily hits, offers calculators to determine the likelihood that a wife is cheating (low, medium or high) and the chances of mom winning custody in court.
Cordell also publicly disputes rhetoric he feels is biased against men. He recently campaigned against a national advertisement on domestic abuse. He said the ad profiled men by improperly implying young boys will grow up to abuse women if fathers fail to actively teach them not to hit women.
Comprehensive statistics on gender and rulings in family court cases aren't fully tracked. But a 2006 survey done of the 1,600 members of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 61 percent of respondents saw a growing shift in family courts toward awarding joint legal custody. Twenty-two percent of lawyers also said sole custody to fathers is also rising.
Marlene Eskind Moses, first vice president of the academy, said rising father involvement in the daily care of their children and more women in the work force have contributed to the rise in joint custody. But the father's rights movement is another factor, because groups have been actively lobbying to change the starting point for custody rights.
"Legislators are beginning to write laws where there's a presumption of joint custody," Moses said.
Fathers' groups also monitor and contribute to elections for family court judges, she said.
"Judges are also mindful of the impact of fathers' rights, and if they're fending for election, certainly that can make a difference," Moses said.
SENDING A MESSAGE
Cordell said his clients, many of them doctors, pick his firm because they know that a Cordell & Cordell lawyer sends a message to the judge that the father is deeply committed to gaining his rights to parent his children.
Former St. Louis family court judge Susan Block, now a family law attorney, tends to agree that judges take note of the firm for that reason. But she argues law firms geared entirely to one gender in divorce or custody disputes may not be offering the best representation because they don't fully understand opposing legal strategy.
"There may be a weakness for representing one gender over another," she said.
Cordell founded the firm in 1990 with his second wife, Yvonne, who no longer practices and now home-schools their two daughters. Cordell, who has also written a self-published book titled "Your Civil War," which frequently quotes the ancient military treatise "The Art of War," may talk tough, but he has a little secret.
His split from his first wife? Amicable, he says.
Related Website: www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stcharles/story/9FA79A17D920E1C2862573CB00115EC3?OpenDocu
©2008 |
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