Recent Blog Posts
Rapp new appointee to ISBA’s Women and the Law Committee
Emily Rapp is a new appointee to the ISBA’s Women and the Law Committee. Her main areas of practice are Family Law and serving as a Guardian ad Litem in Kane, Kendall and DuPage Counties.
Emily was a teenager when bitten by the legal bug. She read Silent Spring, a book by Rachel Carson that discussed the effects of herbicides and pesticides on the environment and decided right then that she wanted to be an environmental lawyer. Then she took environmental law. She is a family law practitioner.
Emily is a 2011 graduate from Loyola University School of Law. During her law school years, she was a 711-licensed clerk at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and clerked for the CTA. In law school, after determining environmental law was not her forte, she had dreams of becoming a Cook County prosecutor. Cook County did not share Emily’s dream. Resourceful Emily had a back-up plan, family law. She used her connections to find her first job out of law school at Peskind Law Firm in St. Charles. She credits that firm and Steve Peskind with teaching her a lot about family law and dealing with clients. From there she went to work for Weiler & Lengle. Rory Weiler continues to mentor her to this day. In April of this year, she opened her own practice in downtown Geneva.
Is a Legal Separation Better for My Family Than a Divorce?
Many couples decide to separate before they fully commit to a divorce. However, simply moving out of one's shared household is not enough to make a separation official. In many cases, couples in Illinois will want to take steps to protect their rights by filing for a legal separation. This will allow them to consider many of the issues that will be addressed during divorce, such as the allocation of parental responsibilities and parenting time, spousal support, and property division, but they will continue to be legally married after the separation. Although this may sometimes be the first step on the road to divorce, some partners will decide to remain separated rather than get divorced due to the financial benefits a legal separation can offer them and their children.