Family Law

Rob McNeely is one of the leading family law attorneys in the State of Florida.  He 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 serves 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:

 Ø  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);

 Ø  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 2006 Legislature modified the move-away law even further, 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;

 Ø creating rotating custody, Fla. Stat. § 61.121, as a permissible custody arrangement for children;

 Ø  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

 Ø  creating 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 has written 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 Mr. McNeely's chapter in a landmark child custody case issued in May 2005.  (See the Wade v, Hirschman link to the left for more information.)  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. 

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

Contact: rob@mcneely.com

Or call: 850-656-7780.