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By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 13, 2026. Michigan’s default rules for an estate were written with a first marriage in mind, and they change their arithmetic the moment a family includes children who belong to only one spouse. The changes are…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 11, 2026. Families put a Northern Michigan cottage into a trust or a limited liability company to share it across a generation without a partition suit. The structure solves the ownership problem well. It also moves…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 8, 2026. Michigan courts decide contested custody by working through 12 lettered factors set out at MCL 722.23, running from (a) to (l). The statute assigns them no weights, so no single factor decides a case…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 3, 2026. A Michigan custody order is built to last, and the statute that allows it to be changed is arranged as a series of thresholds rather than a single question. A parent asking for a…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan Social Security Disability attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 1, 2026. A lumbar MRI shows a disc. It does not show pain, and the rules Social Security applies to a Michigan disability claim are written around that gap. The agency has a two-step method…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 30, 2026. Michigan sets three separate statutory thresholds before a divorce judgment can be entered. They govern where the parties have lived, what the complaint is allowed to say, and how much time has to pass…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan criminal defense attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 28, 2026. Michigan’s drug treatment courts offer intensive supervision and treatment in place of a conventional sentence, and for the right case they change the outcome substantially. The statute that creates them is equally clear that…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan criminal defense attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 26, 2026. Michigan lets a court take a guilty plea in a first domestic violence case, hold off on entering a judgment, and dismiss the charge if the person completes probation. The relief is real and…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 23, 2026. Lists of estate planning mistakes tend to be lists of things that are unwise. The ones that actually cost Northern Michigan families money are narrower than that, because each corresponds to a specific sentence…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan criminal defense attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated September 21, 2026. The Holmes Youthful Trainee Act lets a Michigan court accept a guilty plea from a young defendant without entering a judgment of conviction, and dismiss the case entirely if the person completes the term.…