Author: Carl O. Graham

A new Colorado Court of Appeals decision is unusual in a couple of respects – it’s not often that a property division is reversed on appeal, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an appeal in a case where the marital estate was worth so little (even though to the…

Simply being unemployed at the time of a hearing does not necessarily make imputing income to that parent appropriate. And that’s especially true when the parent is enrolled in full-time education. In Settles, both parents were full-time students at the time of divorce: the father, a former medical doctor who…

OK, it’s hard to fit the real headline into a brief title, but the actual holding of a recent Court of Appeals decision is that the trial court erred when finding the biological father to be the child’s father in a parenting case, because all presumptive fathers were not included…

It seems the issue of what counts as a financial resource in a contempt or maintenance case still results in seemingly contradictory decisions from the courts. We recently wrote a post discussing the Sheehan case, where the Colorado Court of Appeals held that a trial judge could not find a…

Colorado has a statute allowing a third party nonparent to seek visitation (i.e. “parenting time”) with a child under certain circumstances in an Allocation of Parental Responsibilities (APR) action. Typically, the nonparent will be someone who has cared for the child for at least 182 days, but a lesser-used provision…

Employment-related incentives is a complicated maze, with bonuses, stock options, deferred compensation, employer matching into retirement plans, etc. Sometimes they count as income, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes they are divisible property, while at other times they are not. The Court of Appeals, in what appears to be a case…

Although less common than it once was, with long-term marriages courts may still order maintenance for an indefinite period of time – i.e. with no expiration date. While such awards may colloquially be known as “lifetime” maintenance, that’s not strictly speaking accurate, because either former spouse could still file a…

Modern families do not necessarily match the nuclear family stereotype, and it’s a safe bet that June & Ward Cleaver (from “Leave it to Beaver”) would have never heard the term “Psychological Parent.” But when it comes to children, the saying “It takes a Village” often applies, even for child…

The last time we wrote about PERA was during the Covid pandemic, when the deadline to submit orders was temporarily lifted. And now, this is one of those cases where the PERA Co-Beneficiary statute seems clear enough that I’m surprised it was litigated all the way up to the Colorado…

Disputes over Child Vaccines As we have discussed repeatedly in prior blog posts, the issue of child vaccines is getting more contentious each year. And as an increasing number of people show a willingness to act contrary to medical advice, combined with many states treating Covid vaccines different from other…