In his 40 years practicing family law, Frank P. Tranchina Jr. has not only been a litigator in contentious matters related to divorce, marital property division and child custody, he has also taken pride in his role as a counselor to clients in their most vulnerable times, as well as an educator and mentor within the legal community.
Tranchina was born and raised in New Orleans and attended Jesuit High School. Following his graduation from Loyola University with an accounting degree, Tranchina received his law degree from Loyola Law School and has been practicing ever since.
Tranchina is a board-certified family law specialist and helps shape Louisiana law related to family law through his work on the Marriage Persons Committee for the Louisiana State Law Institute, which drafts and makes recommendations regarding revisions to Louisiana laws that are presented to the state legislature yearly.
In addition to seeking victories on behalf of his clients, Tranchina also takes pride in his education and mentorship of young attorneys, as he devotes much of his time to developing and teaching continuing education courses every year, both at large, statewide conferences and in smaller classes throughout Louisiana.
Divorce litigation is, by nature, a contentious field, and Tranchina said his toughest case was one in which he represented the wife of a prominent New Orleans businessman in the early ’90s in the couple’s divorce.
“The most contentious issue was the quantification of the monthly child support payment that was owed to my client,” said Tranchina. “Ordinarily, child support is determined by guidelines similar to a tax table, where the amount is determined by a formula based upon the parties’ incomes. However, in this case, because of the wealth of the husband, the spouses essentially lived a ‘Hollywood’ lifestyle that the child support guidelines were ill-equipped to quantify.”
Tranchina’s undergraduate accounting background came in handy, as he had to piece together and quantify the day-to-day lifestyle of the couple based solely on trial testimony.
“The trial was almost a ‘day in the life of a Hollywood couple,’ because we didn’t have all the financial records, so I had my client describe the lifestyle and the amount of money they spent, and make an argument to the judge to quantify child support based on that.”
The painstaking effort was successful, as the resulting child support award stands to this day as one of the highest ever awarded in Louisiana.
STATS
Specialty Family Law
Company Tranchina & Mansfield, LLC
Experience 40 years in practice
Education BA Loyola University; JD Loyola University Law School
