Nevada family-law case summaries

Lisa and Chris Cunning married in 2000 and had two children. During the marriage, Lisa homeschooled the children and managed the home while Chris, a commercial real estate agent and licensed stockbroker, handled the family's finances and investments. Lisa alleged that Chris began trading in futures without her knowledge in 2013 and by 2018 had lost all of the couple's shared savings. Both spouses, however, had inherited separate money kept in accounts that stayed intact. Lisa filed for divorce in January 2020. Among other things, she asked the court to award her alimony (ongoing financial support), divide the couple's property and debts, and reimburse her for "marital waste" — a claim that Chris had wasted, hidden, or squandered money that belonged to both of them. She pursued extensive investigation, hiring a forensic accountant, subpoenaing more than 27 financial institutions, and generating over 10,000 pages of records. Because Lisa had no income, the court ordered Chris to pay her $2,000 a month in temporary support during the divorce and to keep paying the shared household expenses. But the court noted that because the couple's shared assets were nearly gone, if Chris was using his own separate money to cover shared expenses, whether he should be paid back would be decided at trial. Later, after the couple's minor child finished high school, the court told Lisa to look for a job to become financially independent. At trial, Lisa did not call her forensic accounting expert and did not use the financial records she had gathered to support her marital waste claim. She told the court she was no longer pursuing that claim and instead tried to enforce what she said was an oral promise by Chris to give her his interest in the family home. Her only evidence of this promise was her own testimony. Chris called a rebuttal expert who testified about the time and cost of responding to Lisa's discovery requests. The court divided the property and debts, reimbursed Chris for the separate money he had contributed, and awarded Lisa alimony of $3,000 a month for 84 months (seven years). It also decided that attorney fees were appropriate for both sides. In later orders, the court required Lisa to pay her own lawyers' liens out of her share of the property and to pay part of Chris's attorney and expert fees because her marital waste claim was, in the court's view, pursued without reasonable grounds. After all the additions and subtractions, Chris received $751,190.75 and Lisa received $322,377.16, with more to come once the family home sold. The Court of Appeals upheld nearly all of the district court's decisions. It agreed that the community debts were properly divided equally, that Chris was entitled to be reimbursed for separate money he spent covering shared expenses (including the temporary support paid to Lisa), that the alimony award was supported by the evidence, and that requiring Lisa to pay attorney fees was within the court's discretion. The appeals court declined to revisit the marital waste and hidden asset claims because Lisa had told the trial court she was dropping them. The one place the appeals court sided with Lisa involved two 2000 Honda XR motorcycles. The court had given Chris the physical motorcycles as his separate property and also awarded him an extra $3,500 as reimbursement for those same motorcycles. Because Chris received both the items themselves and money for them — with no evidence the items had been sold or lost to pay shared expenses — the appeals court reversed that $3,500 add-on and restored the original $115,620 reimbursement figure from the initial decree.

Troy and Monika Askew married in December 2006 and had one child, I.A., born in June 2009. Troy worked as a firefighter and had retirement and deferred compensation accounts; Monika ran a photography business but agreed to stay home with the child after I.A.'s birth. After a March 2020 incident in which Monika slapped Troy and Troy hit her back — with the child present — Monika was arrested and Troy obtained a temporary protective order. The parties later agreed to dissolve that order and shared temporary custody. Monika filed for divorce in March 2020. Several events shaped the case. In September 2020, Troy closed his deferred compensation account, withdrew its $98,672 balance, moved it to a separate account, and wired $65,000 to his mother — he later said $35,000 repaid a loan and $30,000 was for his mother "to hold for him." That same month, the child was hospitalized after expressing suicidal thoughts and told providers her mother had hit her. Monika admitted in the divorce proceedings that she once used a hanger to "swat" the child. Troy then sought another protective order on the child's behalf, but the court did not extend it because the application cited no new violence, only the earlier hanger incident. After a five-day trial, the district court entered a divorce decree in February 2022. On custody, the court found that both parents had committed domestic violence against each other in the March 2020 incident, but that Monika was the "primary physical aggressor," which triggered a legal presumption against giving her joint custody. A "presumption" here is a starting assumption the law makes that a party can overcome with enough evidence. The court examined the statutory "best interest of the child" factors, concluded the presumption had been overcome, and ordered joint physical custody with the child rotating three days at a time between each parent. On money, the court found that Troy's withdrawal from his deferred compensation account was a misappropriation of community funds meant to deprive Monika, which gave a "compelling reason" to divide property unequally. In the end, though, the court divided the community property equally: Monika received about $100,000 more in assets but was ordered to pay Troy roughly $50,010 as an offset to balance things out. The court also awarded Monika alimony of $800 per month for 72 months. The Court of Appeals affirmed on all three issues. On custody, it noted the district court did not separately label the hanger incident as an act of domestic violence against the child (which "was potentially an error"), but concluded any error was harmless because the court still applied the presumption against Monika, considered the hanger incident within its best-interest analysis, found it isolated and remote in time, and found the joint custody arrangement would protect the child. The appellate court also stressed that it does not reweigh evidence on appeal. On the property division, it explained that the court actually divided property equally after the offset, so Troy suffered no unequal treatment; and that although Troy was not formally served with the Joint Preliminary Injunction, he acknowledged and asked to be bound by it, so any lack of service was harmless. On alimony, the court found no abuse of discretion, holding that even if the district court compared Troy's gross income to Monika's net income, any such error was harmless and the required statutory factors were properly considered.