My day job is at my law firm, and there are a number of law-related projects that could benefit from Mathematica. One is child support/spousal support in family law cases, which is currently monopolized by Thomson-West with their DissoMaster suite of utilities.

I decided to start this project for two reasons. First, the official Department of Child Support Services online calculator has been offline/broken for three months! Second, the typical program that lawyers and the courts use, DissoMaster, is a subscription-only and Windows-only product, and I don't think the price is fair. So I am presenting version 0.1 of my own suite of tools for handling family law calculations.

The first tool is the attached child support calculator, which uses the statutory formula to compute how much child support is due in a typical scenario: two kids, high-earner nets 10,001 per month, other party nets 5,000 per month, with equal parenting time. Eventually I will do sliders and checkboxes for the options, with automatic adjustments to the formula. I hope to make a CDF file that I can share easily so clients can use it, as well as other lawyers. Having fun so far!