For the month of July, Douglas Family Law Group PLLC — in the heart of White Plains’ financial district – experimented with closing the office at 1 p.m. Fridays. But when we called Madelyn Jaye, a partner in the firm, Friday, July 26, for our 3 p.m. interview, she had only just left the office.
“I have a client who is having a rough time, and I wasn’t about to say, ‘See you Monday,’” she said. “Our mantra is ‘We give our clients white-glove service.’ Every client is the most important client.”
And that can mean holding the client’s hand in times of crisis. Because the divorce and family court systems move slowly, few things are urgent, but some can be, as in the case of one parent absconding with a child on an airplane. Still, if the client thinks the situation is urgent, Jaye is there.
She is one of a quartet that makes up the practice, with some outside assistance. “We have very high standards (for employees),” she said of the small staff.
With approximately 40 active clients, Jaye and her colleagues are busy with divorce litigation and mediation; uncontested divorce; separation agreement; family law (child custody, including international custody, visitation support and surrogacy); prenuptial and postnuptial agreements; and cohabitation agreements.
The post-pandemic era has underscored a need for the kinds of services Douglas Family Law offers, Jaye said: “I think Covid increased tensions, and it resulted in more divorces…. It escalated the issues of custody and parenting.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that 42% of American marriages will end in divorce – with the numbers increasing substantially for second and third marriages (60% and 73% respectively) as divorcés realize they don’t have to be “wedded” to a marriage, Jaye said. But divorces may ultimately decrease as fewer Americans, especially millennials, choose to marry and have children, citing finances, the need to care for aging parents, devotion to their careers and/or just a lack of interest in raising kids. However, those at the other end of the spectrum look to be providing firms like Douglas Family Law Group with plenty of work, as the percentage of “gray divorces” (age 50 and over) more than quadrupled from 1990 to 2019, according to the American Psychological Association, offering seniors unique emotional and socioeconomic challenges.
Like the majority of states in the country, New York and Connecticut are “equitable distribution” states, meaning that in the event of a divorce, the marital property will be divided equitably, or fairly, which is not necessarily equally, as the court takes into account a number of factors, including the length of the marriage, the presence of children, the spouses’ incomes and earning potential post-divorce and contributions to the home. In a long-term marriage, however, the court looks at equitable as equal, Jaye said. (Marital property is different from the separate property you had before you married, which is yours alone, although sometimes these are commingled.) That’s why it’s important, Jaye added, to have a prenup, which spells out who has, keeps and gets what.
One of the most vexing aspects of divorce has been custody of the children. For much of the history of the United States, which followed Roman and English common law, wives derived their legal status from their husbands, and children were the property of their fathers, so custody was awarded to the mother only in the most egregious cases of a husband/father’s behavior. As women began to acquire more property rights in the 19th century, they attained more custody rights as well. By the turn of the 20th century, children were no longer viewed as property and thus could become part of custody disputes, in which the emphasis had shifted from fathers’ rights; to the “tender years doctrine,” which sought to give mothers custody of their children, particularly those younger than age 7; to what’s in “the best interests of the child” today.
Still, female parents are awarded custody of the children the majority of the time, although Jaye added that there is “more recognition that fathers can be just as nurturing as mothers and many times are more nurturing, and just as deserving of being the custodial parent.” Interestingly, when men do seek custody of their children, they are likely to get it.
Growing up in the Edgemont section of Greenburgh, Jaye set her sights on the arts, not the law. She graduated with a Masters of Arts degree from the now-defunct College of New Rochelle and taught art. It was not until her three children went to school that she did as well – for her J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Manhattan with an eye to entertainment law. But an externship with then-matrimonial judge David B. Saxe “was so excellent it changed my track.” Still, Jaye did commercial litigation for 12 years before landing a post in matrimonial law.
Along with the arts and law, Jaye has a passion for horses. She and one of her daughters breed horses and have a mare, two fillies and two geldings. Jaye is also a regular at Greenwich Polo Club, where the glamorous Waccabuc resident cuts a stylish figure, occasionally accompanied by Taco, her Chihuahua. Horses, she said, offer a calming antidote to the drama of family litigation.
“At the end of the day,” she said, “if you smell like a horse, it’s a good day.”
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