The legal world is broken up into specific niches. The most commonly known are the fields of criminal and civil law where people are either accused of crimes or sued for money, respectively. Family law has become much more prominent as a field in the last forty years and we take a look at it in this article.

Ask someone what family law is all about and one word is continually mentioned - divorce. This is hardly a surprise since divorce is a part of the field and tends to get much more attention because it can be very splashy such as when two celebrities decided to call it quits. Ironically, the first legal issue a couple may face is not divorce, but prenuptial agreements before they actually wed. Regardless, both are considered the bedrocks of family law. That doesn't mean they are the only legal niches.

A divorce with a childless couple is one thing, but a divorce where kids involved is another. There is a small library of law in each state dealing with the two subjects that inevitably pop up. The first is child custody where the divorcing parents try to work out who the child will live with and how often the other spouse will get to see them. The second issue is child support where the court has to order one spouse to provide the other with compensation for caring for the child.

There is a certain negative connotation to the above three areas and rightly so. Our last area, however, is all positive. Adoption is considered a part of the family law niche and is critical in that it places orphans with parents desiring a child. It is literally a match made in heaven, a definite win -win. Attorneys providing adoption services consistently rate as the most satisfied it the practice of law. There are other odds and ends when it comes to family law, but these are the big four. This is often viewed as a brutal area of the law, but it need not be as adoption services can show.