Graham.Law Blog

PERA DROs – Simple & Frustrating A silver lining thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic? Preparing DROs (domestic relations orders) to divide Colorado state pensions has long been an exercise in frustration. The forms are deceptively simple – they are fill-in-the-blank, so seemingly have very little room for error. But the…

Court-Enforced Social Distancing? We may see mandated social distancing in a divorce sooner rather than later, and not the way you might expect. An 81 year old New York woman recently filed a motion asking the Court to ban her estranged (and soon-to-be-ex) husband from returning to their home after a…

What Is Alienation Of Affection? I’m always fascinated by unusual family law cases from other states – as indeed attorneys in other states probably look at Colorado and marvel at how we still have common law marriage, or even legal separation. And since adultery is pretty much never relevant in…

Domestic Violence Increases During Stay-at-Home As many people around the world are ordered to stay in their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic it seems that domestic violence rates are on the rise.  Unfortunately, this is not surprising – when people are forced to spend most of their time together in…

Covid-19 & Parenting Even before Colorado issued statewide stay-at-home orders, Covid-19 was causing parents across Colorado to have fears about the impact on child custody. The news was increasingly filled with stories about how the pandemic was affecting parenting time and child custody exchanges as more and more stories about…

Move over Netflix, live-streaming divorce cases will be the entertainment of the future – at least in the United Kingdom. Just last month, the UK Ministry of Justice announced that family law hearings at the Court of Appeal (the second highest court) will be live-streamed to increase transparency and boost public confidence…

Family Law Judicial Proceedings During Coronavirus As discussed in a prior blog re: Family Law Services During Covid-19, the El Paso County Courthouse is closed to routine business, thanks to Governor Polis’s stay-at-home order. The exceptions related to family law are (1) emergency motions to restrict parenting time, (2) hearings on…

Your Family Support Obligation & Covid-19 Even before Gov. Polis issued a statewide stay-at-home order, many families were already struggling with how to handle child custody orders and Covid-19. The updated stay-at-home order makes it clear that parenting exchanges are not suspended, and that parents should be compliant with any court…

Workers Compensation & Property Division Any property acquired during a marriage is presumed to be marital property subject to division, even if it is only in one spouse’s name, with limited exception.  The court can determine that certain property is premarital or is separate property not subject to division. Spouses…

What is Jurisdiction? For a case to be decided in Court, that court needs to have jurisdiction over the people in the case (“personal jurisdiction”), and the type of case at issue (“subject-matter jurisdiction”). These rules can be complicated, especially in the area of child custody jurisdiction, and are the…