Karen Covy
speaker
1,928 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 12 Aug
Karen Covy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Hello, and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making so we can discover what keeps us stuck, and more importantly, how we can get unstuck and start making even tough decisions with confidence. I'm your host, Karen Covey, a former divorce lawyer, mediator, and arbitrator turned coach, author, and entrepreneur. And now, without further ado, let's get on with the show.
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With me today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Lucia Ramirez-Levias. And Lucia is a collaboratively trained divorce attorney and partner at Dubois-Levias Law Group, a woman-owned boutique family law firm in Seattle. She's practiced family law exclusively since 2008. Her passion is helping families navigate divorce with dignity, clarity, and fairness because she knows firsthand the lifelong impact these transitions have on children and parents alike.
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As a collaborative divorce attorney, Lucia guides couples through a structured, team-based process that keeps decisions in their hands, not the courtroom. Lucia's goal is to de-escalate conflict, to ensure financial security, and help families build agreements that support their futures. Divorce is a pivotal moment in a family's life, but with the right guidance, it can be a positive transition. Lucia, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
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Thank you for being here. And I'm curious, I'm always curious when I speak with divorce lawyers, what drew you to family law?
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I love the background in international or immigration law and then going to family law. And that's really one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, because there aren't a lot of lawyers out there who meld both specialties in the way that you do. And I know that there's so much in the news about immigration, and there are a lot of families that I've worked with that have
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International couples, right? So mom is from one country. Dad is from another country. Sometimes the child is the only born in America person in the family. And then the family or the parents decide to get divorced.
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How does all of that work? How does the international aspect of divorce complicate divorce? Or what are the issues that parents in that kind of situation, what do they have to think about above and beyond the divorce? It does complicate things. And at the same time,
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So what happens in that instance? Because I can then just see that the stakes really got high, right? So because the two parents, they've decided their marriage isn't working and they both want to separate, but they both want the kids, right? And so have you seen the situation where one parent is trying to – like they're both fighting over the kids because it's not just about the kids. It's about –
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Yeah, it sounds like it really did. But I'm curious, by that point, when he had filed for divorce, was it then too late for him to sponsor her? Or could he have said, OK, I'll sponsor her? You know, I don't recall the ins and outs on the immigration side of it. And there may not have been a willingness to sponsor, still thinking that this scheme was going to work.
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Because what I was curious is because I know enough about immigration law just to be dangerous. And I know that there are some pretty strict time limits for different things. And so, you know, I guess the bigger question is, are there situations where the person, you know, the one parent has just blown the timeline and there's nothing you can do?
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Yeah, that makes all the sense in the world. But let's talk about a little bit friendlier case or something where you've mentioned collaborative divorce. And a lot of you and I both know what that is. But for the benefit of the listener who might not have heard of it before or know exactly what it is, can you explain what collaborative divorce is and how it's particularly effective in an immigration or a
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a binational foreign-born situation.
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you know, at least one parent who's foreign born, if not both, is that immigration lawyer who can then, would it be possible for the immigration lawyer to be acting as a neutral or as a lawyer to the couple on how they can maximize their immigration status or how they can use the law to keep their family intact, even if they do get a divorce?
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So in that situation when they're in the process of getting a green card, and I ask because I've worked with clients who are in exactly this situation, right? Somebody's in the process of getting a green card or both of them are. Is it at that point wiser to wait before you file anything in court in terms of a divorce to wait until they get the green card then file? Or is it okay to file anyway?
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Right. Well, that's one of the things that I personally like about the collaborative process is that you can be working on your divorce and working towards negotiating a settlement and a parenting agreement and the whole thing before anybody files anything, right? So a lot goes on behind the scenes, which to me would be a huge advantage of the collaborative divorce process in this kind of a setting.
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That makes a lot of sense. Let's veer off a little bit from the immigration aspect of this, though, and just say a couple that there's one person is foreign-born, the other one's American-born. What I see a lot is concern over the kids because the person who's foreign-born wants to be able to take the children to go see grandma and grandpa in their home country, and the person who's not from that home country is—
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is terrified that if they let the kids go, they'll never see them again, right? Or that something bad will happen and they'll have no way to get to their children. So in that kind of a situation, what do you do?
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So you're talking about more than just an agreement between the parents or a text message. You're talking about actually formalizing the travel dates and going to court and saying, you know, judge, will you sign off on this order? The kids are going to go from X date to Y date.
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But what happens in the case where the children are very young, like two, three years old, and the divorce is over, but the parent is still concerned that if dad or mom, whoever is the foreign-born parent, takes this child out of the country, they'll never see them again. Now what?
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Just thinking like a lawyer in this situation, though, if the parent who's foreign-born takes the children, that foreign-born parent also couldn't come back to the United States because if they came without the children, bad things are going to happen to them, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I have had cases where their children were removed to a non-hay country, and the
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