Rob McNeely is one of the leading family law attorneys in the State of Florida. He built his practice in complex family law litigation before expanding in the late 1990s to entertainment law.  Mr. McNeely has been retained to lead complex family law litigation cases from Tallahassee, to Gainesville, to St. Petersburg, to Miami-Dade, to Jacksonville, including numerous smaller cities in between, including Panama City, Crawfordville, Monticello, Madison, and Quincy.

His unique expertise comes not just from reading family law, but from creating it.  He has served in leadership positions in the Family Law Section of The Florida Bar.  He either wrote or assisted in writing and passing several changes to Florida family law in 1996 - 1998, including: 

-- the Visitation Rights Enforcement Act of 1996, Fla. Stat. § 61.13(4)(a) (giving courts options to sanction and educate parents who interfered with the other parent's court-ordered visitation);

-- the original move-away law, Fla. Stat. § 61.13(2)(d) (removing a presumption in favor of custodial parents relocating with children; superceding case law and focusing on whether a move, with one parent left behind, would be best for a child). The Legislature modified the move-away law even further in 2006 and 2008, creating Fla. Stat. § 61.13001, a modification Mr. McNeely helped fine tune and pass on behalf of the Family Law Section of The Florida Bar and, most importantly, keeping the provision that relocations must promote a child's best interests;

-- creating rotating custody, Fla. Stat. § 61.121, as a permissible custody arrangement for children. This provision was repealed in 2008 when the Legislature removed the term "custody" from family law vernacular, but thousands of families succeeded with rotating custody arrangements and, where best for the children, it has become embedded in Florida family law;

-- amending domestic violence laws to remove incentives to accuse the other parent falsely of domestic violence in order to gain a custody litigation advantage; and

-- creating and serving for six years on Florida's Commission on Responsible Fatherhood which, in 1997, was the nation's first legislatively created commission to study and report on social and children's problems associated father absence, both voluntary and involuntary.

Mr. McNeely is also a frequent and leading author on family law matters. For eight years he wrote the chapter on child custody in The Florida Bar's outstanding, hardback, continuing legal education book, "Florida Dissolution of Marriage."  The Florida Supreme Court relied on, and quoted, Mr. McNeely's chapter in a landmark child custody case issued in May 2005. (See Wade v. Hirschman, 903 So. 2d 928 (Fla. 2005).)  In 2004, he published a paper on child support reform he delivered in Santa Barbara in 2003 to a conference on the economics of child support. 

 A member of the Family Law Section of The Florida Bar, Mr. McNeely has served on its Executive Council and frequently is invited to participate in special committees exploring child support reform and other matters. 

Mr. McNeely is also a skilled appellate lawyer.  Visit the Other Areas tab  to see some of the family law cases with which he has been involved.