Nevada family-law case summaries

Adam and Sandy Goldstein married in April 2011 and went through divorce and child custody proceedings beginning in 2019 after Sandy filed for divorce and custody. The case was split into two parts (a "bifurcated" trial): a custody trial in May 2021 and a financial trial in September 2021. In May 2022, the district court awarded Sandy primary physical custody and permission to move with the children to Colorado, finding that Adam had opposed the relocation in bad faith. The court also found that Adam had made unsubstantiated claims that Sandy was an alcoholic, withheld parenting time from Sandy, influenced one of the children's testimony, and made an unsubstantiated claim of educational neglect to gain an advantage. The court issued a separate divorce decree on financial issues that included alimony for Adam. Adam did not appeal any of those orders. After those rulings, both parties asked for attorney fees. Sandy requested fees under a Nevada statute and argued that Adam's bad-faith conduct drove up the cost of the litigation. The district court denied Adam's request and granted Sandy's. The court reasoned that the attorney fees were a "community obligation" (a shared marital debt) and that it could divide that debt unequally because Adam had engaged in improper litigation tactics that wasted shared marital assets. After Sandy submitted billing records seeking $194,861.25, the court reduced that figure—cutting certain "block billing" entries it could not allocate, reducing the custody-trial fees by 30 percent, and reducing the total by another 20 percent for time spent supervising a junior attorney—and awarded $124,627.12. On appeal, the Court of Appeals agreed with Adam on one point: the attorney fees should not have been treated as a community obligation. Drawing on prior Nevada cases, the court explained that debt incurred after spouses separate, and not for the benefit of the marriage, is not community debt. Because these fees were incurred after separation and did not benefit the community, the district court could not use that as the basis for the award. However, the Court of Appeals affirmed anyway. Under the rule that an appellate court will uphold a lower court's decision if it reached the right result even for the wrong reason, the court looked to a different legal basis that Sandy had raised below: a statute allowing fees against a party who brings or maintains claims without reasonable grounds or to harass the other party. The district court had already made detailed written findings that Adam pursued frivolous and bad-faith positions—on relocation, the alcoholism allegation, withholding the children, and influencing a child's testimony. Importantly, the Court of Appeals noted that Adam, in his reply brief, conceded that those findings were the type that would support a fee award under that statute. Because Sandy was the prevailing party and the findings supporting a fee award were backed by substantial evidence, the court held the fee award could stand. The court also rejected Adam's arguments that the district court ignored the income disparity between the parties and that the amount awarded was unreasonable. The record showed the court did consider income—finding the parties had essentially equal net income after accounting for Sandy's rental and travel costs versus Adam's low housing expenses, and noting Adam received alimony—and that the court applied the established factors for setting a reasonable fee amount and explained its reductions.