Graham.Law Blog

If you have to litigate a case involving child support arrears, you are going to wish the payments went through the Colorado Family Support Registry, or FSR for short. The registry is a state agency which receives child support and alimony payments from the obligor (that’s the parent or spouse…

It seems that contempt of court has had a lot of attention from the Colorado Court of Appeals in recent months – while the right to counsel issue has not arisen recently, we have written about numerous appellate decisions pertaining to contempt including the requirement that remedial contempt have a…

Parents owe their children a duty of support – this has long been recognized in Colorado’s child support statute (), and in every family law case imaginable. But can psychological parents, or other third party nonparents owe child support? Three years ago, in a groundbreaking decision, the Colorado Court of…

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…

While the federal minimum wage remains stuck at the same $7.25/hr it has been since 2009, many states have now left that figure in the dust, Colorado included. The Colorado Department of Labor has announced that on January 1, 2022 the state minimum wage will increase to $12.56/hr, from the…

On June 7, 2021, Governor Polis signed into law House Bill 21-1220, which contains the 2021 changes to the Colorado Child Support statute, as recommended by the Colorado Child Support Commission. The child support changes, which are the first since the 2019 changes to reflect the change in maintenance taxation,…

Capital gains counts as income for purposes of both child support, (5)(a)(I)(N), and maintenance, (8)(C)(I)(N). We even have a full article on capital gains and other investment income in the Colorado Family Law Guide discussing the various ways courts have interpreted this provision, and how they calculate capital gains. But…

The Colorado Court of Appeals recently issued a new contempt decision which somewhat wraps up the law already set forth in prior cases, but also includes a new twist – ability to pay means taking into consideration that the payor has assets he could sell to generate revenue. In Evans,…

Colorado law requires a court to divide the “marital estate” (i.e. all assets & debts) as of the date of the divorce itself, not the date of separation. (5). But what happens when a spouse engages in the dissipation of assets? But what happens when one spouse causes funds to…

Paternity cases, and determining a child’s parentage in Colorado, are governed by the Uniform Parentage Act. And courts are limited to the text of that statute. In K.L.W., the mother of twin 9-month old babies was not in dispute, but the children had two different presumptive parents under the Uniform…