Family Law & Divorce Attorney in St. Paul, Minnesota

James D. Capra, Inc.

26 Exchange Street E Suite 310 St. Paul, Minnesota 55101 USA

 (651) 291-0903
 (651) 291-0842

www.saint-paul-divorce-lawyer.com
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Law Firm Overview Free Consultation

At James D. Capra, Inc. in St. Paul, Minnesota, initial consultations are free, no time limit. You decide what you want to talk about and how long you need to stay. Everything is confidential, in a quiet, supportive environment. We can accommodate your work schedule, too. Come in before work, during your lunch hour, after rush hour, in the evening - we'll find something for you. Weekends are also available when necessary.

We love e-mail to the extent that there is no charge for e-mail correspondence - ever. Clients routinely send just about anything you could imagine: photos, spreadsheets, other e-mails, jpg's, etc. It is truly a great way to keep your bill to a minimum and still maintain regular contact with your lawyer. Why take a problem home with you for the weekend if we can help?

We have considerable involvement with various legal aid agencies in Minnesota and take on a couple of pro bono each year through the various volunteer attorney panels. What is becoming evident is that there is an ever-growing class of people in our State that earn too much to qualify for free legal services and yet cannot afford a $350 per hour attorney. People ‘on the fringe’ need legal services, too, and they constitute a portion of our clientele. Money is tight and that’s often what drives people into the Court system in the first place. Legal services are never cheap, but if there’s anyone capable of working within the limits of your budget, it’s us. You’ll see.

Cash is good. We take personal checks and debit cards as well. If you have a Visa, Master Card, Discover or American Express, we can also work with you, and I do not pass servicing charges off to my clients.

Year this Office was Established: 1989

Practice Areas

Practice Areas Description

James D. Capra, Inc. represents clients in family law matters:

- Divorce

With the ever increasing pace of modern society we have come to see an equally skyrocketing mortality rate of undying love. Nothing is forever, it seems. For whatever reason, good people can no longer occupy the same marital relationship and determine they were better friends than spouses. You never know somebody until you live with them. Or perhaps you never really know somebody until you divorce them. The good news is there is in fact life after marriage, or at least there can be. Divorce is very much a quality of life issue, and the decisions you make in deciding how to end it can be absolutely the most profound life choices you'll ever make. I've got a file cabinet full of people who second that one.

- Legal Separation

We admittedly don’t often advise legal separation, the reason being that the vast majority of legal separation cases we see ultimately end up in divorce. There’s just not much opportunity to mend fences with a Court decree out there dubbing you legally and officially separated, often establishing separate residences, with separate times with the children and separate financial responsibilities for the now-fragmented household. To the extent legal separation culminates in divorce, you’re simply paying the lawyer twice to do the same job. Yet again there are people who are earnestly torn between the inability to make that final dissolution decisions and the realization that they can’t spend another day under the same roof with their spouse. It does happen, and that’s why legal separations happen as well. I always defer to the client as I must, but I’ve had some very, very long discussions with people before going this route and that's how it should be.

- Child Custody

Whether you are married to your partner or you just have a child in common, the basic picture in a child custody or parenting time dispute goes like this: You have two people who love the same children dearly. The stakes are high and emotions run hot. On the one hand, you can reach some kind of truce, where neither parent gets all the time with the kids they want, but you found some tolerable middle ground and stopped the war. And then there are the scenarios where you simply have to put it to the district court judge, a third-party government official who doesn’t really know either one of you, or your kids for that matter, and who is very decidedly displeased about being put in the situation of having to apply the “best interests” law for your children. If they have to, your governmental decision maker will make a best-guess approximation on how things should be, based on an extremely limited snapshot of the lives of you and your family. Most often, this official will never have even met your kids. Any of them. Ponder that.

- Child Support

Nobody can seriously dispute that times are tough and they aren’t going to be getting better any time soon. It doesn’t help that your family has split up and now there are two households to finance instead of one. Maybe you’ve started a second family with a new partner and have additional mouths to feed. There never seems to be enough money to go around and there is also no clearly fair way of deciding who gets how much of it. The law of child support essentially consists of a very crude legislative approximation of how much is needed to raise a child in the backdrop of how much the parents can realistically afford to provide.

- Property Division

The division of marital property is executed through either an agreement between the two parties, or a court order, which typically requires going to trial. A great majority of divorces end in an agreement, or "stipulated decree". When the parties can work towards an agreeable distribution of property, it makes the entire divorce process much more efficient.

- Marital Debt

The distribution of debt through a divorce is at least fairly logical. If the debt was incurred during the course of the marriage, it's considered to be a shared responsibility. Debts that are associated with a benefit to only one of the spouses, an education loan for example, are typically held to be the responsibility of the spouse who received the benefit of the loan. Likewise, debts associated with assets, like a car payment or a house, will typically be the responsibility of the spouse who keeps the associated asset.

Attorneys

Mr. James D. Capra Attorney Child Support and Custody, Divorce, Family Law, Litigation

More Information on James D. Capra, Inc.

Family Lawyer in St. Paul, Minnesota
St. Paul, Minnesota Divorce Law Firm
Legal Separation Lawyer, St. Paul, MN
St. Paul, MN Child Custody Attorney
Child Support Lawyer in St. Paul, MN
St. Paul, MN Property Division Lawyer
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