April 2025 | Evan Williams
The Attorney: Lise Hudson
The Niche: Older adults
Growing up in the Palm Beaches, Lise Hudson was part of a nationally ranked high school debate team and, after transferring from the University of Florida to George Washington University, she took a year off school and worked for a local law firm, representing plaintiffs’ personal injury cases.
Though she moved on to family law, and is now in her 35th year of practice, her clients today aren’t so different. “People going through divorce are very much like those going through accidents — it’s just emotional injury, not physical injury,” Hudson says.
Increasingly, her clients are from older generations — men and women in their golden years whose relationships diverged after moving to Florida. So-called “gray divorce” is on the rise with Baby Boomers, even as it falls for younger generations. Hudson estimates that her practice has seen the number of people over the age of 65 increase by roughly 40% in the last decade.
When couples retire to Florida, Hudson has observed, they sometimes seek different paths. “I frequently see that one member of the couple will really engage and participate and kind of almost have a resurgence in their personal life — become more active and involved in their community — and then one person may become more housebound and more comfortable staying at home. And so, the interests of the couple seem to diverge. More and more, the solution for those couples is divorce.”
Hudson, who is on the young end of the Baby Boomer spectrum, understands that older clients may have a greater sense of urgency. “With younger clients, there is an ability to rebuild,” she says. “With older clients it’s a much different perspective.”
A few years ago, Hudson took on a client who was in his mid-90s. His wife was a few years younger. It was their second marriage; they’d been together for more than three decades, and both had children with prior spouses. The wife’s children removed their mom from the home and told Hudson’s client that she was filing for divorce.
“I still to this day don’t know if the mother agreed with it,” Hudson says. But she had signed a power of attorney giving one child legal authority. “I see that happen more and more,” Hudson says.
The negotiations took more than a year, during which both parties physically declined. Both died within months of the case ending.
By the Numbers
Divorce rates are falling, except for people 65 and older. But younger couples still divorce more often.
Between 1990 and 2021, divorce rates in the U.S. fell for those younger than 45 and doubled for people 65 and older, according to a 2022 study by Bowling Green State University sociologists Susan L. Brown and I-Fen Lin.
The trend is driven by Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964). The researchers point toward several causes: a rising emphasis on personal happiness and individualism, the eroding norm of marriage, women’s growing financial autonomy, and adults being in second or third marriages that are less stable than first marriages. They also noted that Baby Boomers had higher-than-average divorce rates even when they were younger.
The overall rate of divorce is still much higher among younger people, even if far fewer are separating than they did 30 years ago. In 2021, the national divorce rate was highest among 15- to 44-year-olds with more than 18 divorces per 1,000 couples, versus 5.5 per 1,000 for those 65 and older.
Sources: Bowling Green State University, National Center for Family and Marriage Research; CDC