Graham.Law Blog

Since Colorado enacted the Uniform Dissolution of Marriage Act more than 50 years ago, dissolution of marriage cases have been “no-fault.” (See this blog post for more details about Colorado no-fault divorces and grounds for dissolution of marriage). One spouse’s misconduct or “fault”, including for domestic violence, was generally irrelevant…

I wrote a while back on a case concerning the importance of having a promissory note for a loan from a friend or family member because the spouse must prove that the payment was a loan to be repaid, not simply a gift. And in that post, I gave rather…

The North Dakota Supreme Court recently held that a prenuptial agreement signed just two days before the wedding was still valid and that the other spouse had sufficient time to confer with counsel because she had been presented with the agreement several weeks previously. Why does a North Dakota ruling…

Pay into Social Security, and you receive the benefits. Unless the system goes insolvent, this has long been everyone’s assumption about how the system worked. Unfortunately, a federal law dating back 40 years known as the “Windfall Elimination Provision” discriminated against employees who had paid into Social Security before transferring…

In a brand-new case decided last week, the Colorado Court of Appeals held that a child’s funds held in a properly constituted Uniform Transfer to Minors Act (UTMA) account are not marital assets, and it was error for the trial court to divide the account between the parties on a…

Typically, when spouses own joint property, such as by jointly titling an asset, that creates a presumption at divorce that the property is a marital asset, see, e.g., Finer. A spouse who brings an asset into marriage (i.e., premarital assets) or was gifted property during the marriage can generally preserve…

Rules are rules – without them, it would be anarchy. Thanks to Colorado having a different standard of service requirement depending upon what legal documents are being served, even courts are confused about when email service of process may be permitted. For non-contempt cases, the most common types of service…

Personal jurisdiction is one of those concepts that causes people’s eyes to glaze over—even lawyers’. It brings back memories of our Civil Procedure class in law school, having to analyze decades-old U.S. Supreme Court cases that discuss what minimum contacts are required to haul an out-of-state respondent into court in…

It is unusual to see copyright law or other intellectual property issues in a dissolution of marriage case – the last time we wrote about intellectual property was in 2020, involving the division of Ewan McGregor’s royalties for acting in Star Wars. And like that case, the subject of today’s…

Note – this post is about Colorado efiling for court documents, so if you came here looking for information on filing your tax return, sorry. Colorado attorneys have long had the ability to file documents electronically (aka “efiling”) with the Court in certain cases. It has been a real timesaver,…