Divorce is often the single largest financial transaction of a person's life.   It requires people to deal with the law, and to make difficult decisions involving many financial and tax issues.  Yet before Family Law Software, there was no software of any kind to assist the individuals who were dealing with this complex, expensive, stressful process.

Family Law Software, Inc.'s founders, Daniel Caine and Wendell Smith have spent years developing a multi-disciplinary approach to the stresses of divorce, tackling this issue from emotional, legal, and financial perspectives. 

Emotional

For the emotional area of the site, they explored perspectives on divorce from every imaginable vantage point -- therapists, lawyers, journalists, and people who had been through the divorce experience.  They then synthesized these perspectives and refined the most important points into hundreds of succinct nuggets for the FamilyLawSoftware web site.

Legal

When piecing together the legal portion of the site, Caine, a Harvard Law School graduate, researched the law of each state covered and again translated the statutes and cases into plain English text which a non-lawyer can read and understand.

Financial

Caine, who majored in Economics at Yale and also graduated from the Harvard Business School, developed a complete financial planner with explanations and calculations geared specifically to divorcing individuals. Quick calculators, a pension evaluator, and other helpful financial tools were also developed for purchase via the site.

Smith, who worked at artificial intelligence pioneer Gold Hill Computers and cocreated Kiplinger's TaxCut, took Caine's content and presented it in a consistent user-friendly interface.

The company's goal was (and is) to create software that is helpful and at the same time very easy to use. 

The two founders of Family Law Software were also partners in the company that developed the critically-acclaimed and best-selling income tax software program "Kiplinger's TaxCut."

Under these founders, Kiplinger's TaxCut was a 4-time winner of PC Magazine's Editor's Choice award, and it is now (as it was then) the #2-selling income tax software program in the United States. In 1993, H&R Block, Inc., acquired TaxCut, and in 1996 Caine and Smith left H&R Block to begin work on Family Law Software products.

With Family Law Software, Inc., Caine and Smith are bringing to bear their legal, financial, and tax expertise in helping consumers get control of stressful and complex financial issues.

The FamilyLawSoftware site entered beta release in August, 1999 and was officially launched in February of 2000.