We have a lot of people come into us who are victims of domestic violence and I think we’re well suited to help them because we understand that many people who are victims have trouble telling their stories. And we have done a lot of work on battered spouses and with battered spouses and we recognize that very often a client will come to us and essentially say nothing happened, they blame themselves. And we help them, with experts sometimes, draw the story out of them. In limited cases that can sometimes lead to what we call a Tevis claim being placed in the divorce complaint. And that is a claim for damages for assault and battery or for emotional distress that one spouse inflicted upon the other.

They tend not to be successful all that often unless there are serious injuries and generally speaking you do need some kind of physical injury to get a judge to take the abuse seriously in terms of awarding damages. But it does happen.

The problem that we often find is that people don’t tell anyone what really happened. And just like in any other case where there is an injury you need medical records, you need witnesses. So that while the cases are rare they are out there and we’re used to prosecuting them and have had some very successful results. Sometimes in the six figures in terms of getting our clients damages.