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.

This is a divorce case centered on how to divide property between a husband and wife when one spouse owns a business he started before the marriage. Shane Mamone founded a construction company, SCM, in 2000, years before he married Charisse in 2015. During the marriage, SCM grew and landed several large, multimillion-dollar contracts, largely through Shane's continued work, reputation, and business relationships. When the couple divorced, the central financial question was: how much of the increase in the business's value during the marriage belongs to the "community" (shared property both spouses can claim) versus Shane's "separate property" (what he brought into the marriage and keeps for himself)? Nevada courts use two competing methods to answer that question. One method, called Van Camp, tends to apply when a business grows mostly because of outside factors (like a booming economy). Under Van Camp, the community gets credited only with the fair value of the working spouse's labor, and the rest stays separate property. The other method, called Pereira, tends to apply when the growth comes mostly from the working spouse's own skill and effort. Under Pereira, the owner spouse keeps his original investment plus a fair rate of return, and any additional growth is shared as community property. The trial court used the Pereira method, finding that SCM's growth was due largely to Shane's own efforts. Shane even admitted at trial that the big contracts would not have come his way without the work he put in during the marriage. The Court of Appeals agreed there was enough evidence to support that choice, so it upheld the use of Pereira. Shane raised several other arguments. He said the community's share of the business should be reduced by all the household expenses paid during the marriage, some of which came from his separate money. The court rejected this because the couple's community money was never used up (Shane alone reported over $1.2 million in wages during the marriage that counted as community property). Under Nevada law, when a spouse voluntarily uses separate money to pay shared expenses while shared money is still available, that use is treated as a gift to the community, not something that must be paid back. The court did agree with Shane on one point. During the marriage, Shane took $37,500 out of SCM to repay his cousin for his half-interest in a separate rental property (200 Citrus LLC). The trial court handled this by increasing Charisse's share of the business by that amount. The Court of Appeals said the correct approach was instead to subtract the $37,500 from Shane's separate-property interest in the business before calculating the community share. Doing the math the correct way, the community interest in SCM should have been $547,500, not $510,000. Because this was a calculation error, the court reversed that part of the decree and sent it back to be corrected. On the retirement account (the SEP IRA), Shane argued the whole thing, or at least his early 2015 contributions, should be his separate property. But he began contributing the same year he married, and he gave no clear evidence about exactly when and how much he contributed. Because Nevada presumes property acquired after marriage is community property, and Shane didn't overcome that presumption, the court upheld splitting the account, with Charisse receiving half ($93,000). The court also upheld treating certain vehicles as community property (Shane didn't provide evidence they were separate) and dividing the couple's $206,625 tax overpayment equally as community property. Finally, Shane challenged having to pay 64 percent of Charisse's attorney fees. The court declined to consider this because Shane never filed a separate, timely appeal from the later order that actually awarded the fees, and he offered no supported legal argument that the award was an abuse of discretion. Charisse separately argued that the SEP IRA turned out to be worth far more than the roughly $186,000 Shane described at trial (a post-trial disclosure showed over $500,000). The court declined to address this because Charisse never filed a cross-appeal, which is required to change the judgment in her favor.