The parenting plan is one of the most consequential documents a family will ever sign. It governs how children move between two households, how decisions get made about their health and education, and what accountability looks like when one parent has concerns about the other. Get it right, and families have a real structure to lean on. Get it wrong, and conflict becomes a recurring theme.
In highly contentious cases involving additional tools and technologies, such as those with strict communication rules or substance misuse, accurate plans are even more important. This is because they must accurately reflect what the relevant technologies can accommodate. Soberlink, for example, which has over 15 years of experience reviewing court orders and parenting plans, has found that the vast majority of professionals will specify monitoring details in the parenting plan that are impossible for their client to achieve simply because Soberlink does not offer these options. For clients using multiple tools, this pattern of parenting plan details that cannot be adhered to causes additional stress on an already overwhelmed parent.
Few people understand the importance of accurate and specific parenting plans better than Michele Locke. A licensed family law attorney in Texas for 24 years, former Family Associate Court Judge, who returned to private practice and occasionally mediates, Locke has seen the parenting plan from every possible angle. She grew up as a child of divorce, became a stepparent, raised three sons of her own, and eventually navigated her own divorce after 22 years of marriage. She’s tried cases to a judge and juries, presided over them from the bench, and now helps parties reach agreements before they ever get that far. That breadth of experience is precisely why her perspective on drafting matters.
The through line across all of those roles? The words in the order shape everything that comes after.
Families return to court for many reasons, but imprecise drafting is one of the most common and most preventable. When an order leaves room for interpretation, it can quickly become a tool in the hands of someone motivated to exploit it.
Locke is direct about the pattern she observed from the bench: “Vague orders, in particular, become a playground for individuals with personality disorders and/or substance abuse issues to create an environment wherein additional litigation becomes a requirement.”
The provisions most likely to generate follow-on litigation are the ones that sound simple on the surface: which parent has final say on medical decisions, what happens when they can’t agree on a school, how psychiatric and psychological decisions get made. When an order is silent or ambiguous on those points, Locke says, “there is likely to be litigation in a families’ future.”
The goal of good drafting, in her view, is to limit the grounds for modification from the start. “One way to limit the grounds for future modifications is to ensure that the final orders have specifically drafted language that aims to control and limit the inevitable issues.”
In mediation, Locke hears a particular phrase that gives her pause every time: “Oh, we do not need to put that in — we will be able to agree.” Her response is consistent and blunt.
“I stop and explain the realities of dynamics when the family unit is no longer under the same roof,” she says. “It may be great that you are getting along well with your co-parent — what happens if that relationship falls apart just like your relationship did?”
She coaches attorneys and clients to build orders that anticipate life changes, not just present circumstances. New partners enter the picture. Financial situations shift. The co-parenting relationship that felt cooperative at the time of settlement can look entirely different eighteen months later.
“It is usually much easier to agree to deviate from an order than it is to change orders to address the issues that you didn’t anticipate when you separated from your co-parent,” Locke explains. “Orders should be drafted with enough specificity that the majority of issues that arise in family law cases have a path to resolution laid out in the order. Doing so can help to avoid the expense, both emotional and financial, that comes from additional litigation.”
In practice, that means going further than most parties initially want to go, specifying not just custody schedules, but exchange logistics, digital communication platforms, decision-making protocols, and what happens when those systems break down.
Not every family needs the same level of structure, and Locke is quick to acknowledge that. For lower-conflict families, a well-drafted order with clear defaults can go a long way. For high-conflict cases, the calculus changes entirely.
“High conflict cases are likely to end up in litigation post the original order,” she says. “It is paramount that the drafting language in high conflict cases be tight, loophole-free, and extensive to address the particular issues in these types of cases.”
She’s candid that technology can’t resolve every conflict. Some cases will return to a judge year after year, regardless of what restrictions are in place. But the advancement of tools like co-parenting communication platforms and remote alcohol monitoring has made a meaningful difference in many situations. “Technology and its use have helped reduce the amount of conflict. Technology is likely never to resolve all conflict, but even the reduction of conflict can be helpful for the children who are the ones who end up suffering in these high-conflict cases.”
That last point is the one that drives the rest of the conversation: the children. Every drafting decision, every provision that gets left vague or left out entirely, has a downstream effect on kids who have no say in any of it.
When alcohol monitoring is part of a parenting plan, the drafting stakes get higher. A vague provision is a problem, but so is a precise one built around parameters that don’t actually exist. Attorneys who draft Soberlink provisions without understanding how the system works can inadvertently create orders that are impossible to implement.
Soberlink offers two levels of monitoring. Level 1, the Parenting Time Only program, provides flexible testing during the monitored parent’s parenting time, with the testing schedule self-managed. Level 2, the Daily Testing program, runs seven days a week with the schedule managed by Soberlink directly.
Other set parameters for Level 2, for example, include:
Those are the available parameters. An order that calls for details outside of the options above will create a conflict between the court order and the Soberlink Monitoring Agreement. When the two documents are in conflict, the Soberlink Monitoring Agreement governs the actual setup, and the Court Order has no validity in regard to Soberlink testing.
This is exactly the kind of drafting error Locke’s checklist is designed to prevent. Her list of provisions that every Soberlink order should address is worth quoting in full:
“The order needs to include language that requires the following: the level of subscription service; who is required to be a notified party on the subscription; depending on the level of subscription, the times of testing; the permissible time window for testing before and after the designated testing schedule; what the retesting options are… what happens to possession if there is a positive, failed, or missed test; if there are phases of possession, what immediately happens to possession if there is a failed, missed, or positive test; and finally, it is imperative to include in an order the definition of what a failed test, missed test, refusal to test, or positive test ultimately means.”
The Concerned Party designation is one detail that often gets overlooked. Soberlink’s system is built to deliver real-time results via text and email to a designated Concerned Party, who receives alerts and has access to the test results and schedules. Specifying who that person is, and at what reporting tier, is a meaningful decision that should be addressed in the order, not left to be figured out during setup.
Soberlink’s Family Law Order Form was built specifically to walk attorneys through each of these decisions in a structured way, mapping directly to what the system can actually do. With more than 15 years of experience supporting family law cases, Soberlink has developed these frameworks in close collaboration with the professionals who use them, judges, attorneys, mediators, and guardians ad litem, so the guidance reflects how these provisions actually play out in practice.
For attorneys who want a deeper orientation before drafting, Soberlink’s best practices guide, developed by a panel of industry experts, recommends testing schedules of two to three times per day with a two-hour test window, at either level, for at least a year. That’s the kind of grounded, field-tested guidance that makes the difference between a provision that works and one that creates problems the moment monitoring begins.
Locke closes with the framing that has guided her through 24 years of practice, from the courtroom to the bench to the mediation table: “Words matter. The words you use in your underlying order can be used as a weapon or shield in the future. Choose your weapon or shield carefully as it will have a lifetime of impact and control over your life.”
Specificity in a parenting plan is the architecture that allows two separated people to keep showing up for their children. The more carefully that architecture is designed, the less likely it is to need emergency repairs down the road.
For family law professionals who want to go deeper on how to structure alcohol monitoring provisions, interpret results, and apply these tools effectively across a range of case types, Soberlink offers a complimentary Lunch and Learn.
Schedule yours at soberlink.com/lunch-and-learn.
