Residents of Illinois surely realize that formally adopting a child requires a lot of time and paperwork on the part of the prospective parents. And while real life, in the guise of raising other children and looking for employment, might get in the way of the time and effort required, the fact remains that it still must be done. A child custody case in Cook County, Illinois, about a 3-year-old boy is hinging on the issue of that lack of that paperwork and whether it can be overlooked.

The convoluted case is a byproduct of a couple's divorce. When the couple married, the woman had already adopted one child on her own and was in the process of adopting a second child. After they got married, the couple adopted a third child together.

The child in question is the middle child. The man has been pleading his case that for all intents and purposes, he is the boy's father: he helped raise him, along with the boy's adoptive mother, and considered him to be his son. However, the man never filed stepparent adoption papers, and when the couple got divorced, he had no legal standing as the boy's father and was denied visitation and shared custody as a result.

The man says he was busy looking for work and raising the children so he neglected to file the paperwork to make the adoption official. He also said he didn't expect that his marriage would end, so he didn't feel like the matter was urgent. In any case, many of these thorny issues could have been resolved beforehand by consulting with an experienced family law attorney and making sure any potential legal scenarios could be handled.

Source: Chicago Tribune, "3-year-old adoptee at center of unusual custody fight," Steve Schmadeke, Jan. 29, 2012