Nevada family-law case summaries

William and Ammie Wallace married in 2009, had three children, separated in 2017, and divorced in September 2020. In their divorce decree, they agreed that Ammie would have primary physical custody and that William would have the children on weekday afternoons from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., with the parents alternating weekends. According to the opinion, the parents did not actually follow that schedule for a period. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the children were learning from home and both parents were working from home, they used a different, more equal arrangement that William described as joint physical custody with a "2/3/2 timeshare." They kept this up until the children went back to in-person school in spring 2021, at which point they returned to the schedule written in the divorce decree. In June 2021, William asked the court to change the custody order, arguing that the parents had really been sharing custody roughly equally ("de facto joint physical custody") and that keeping that arrangement was in the children's best interest. Ammie asked the court to deny the motion without a hearing, saying William had not shown any substantial change in circumstances affecting the children, who she said were doing well in her care. After a 20-minute hearing without testimony or evidence, the district court denied William's motion. The court found that Ammie had primary physical custody (having the children about 70% of the time) and that William had not shown "adequate cause" for an evidentiary hearing because he had not demonstrated a substantial change in circumstances. The Court of Appeals affirmed. It explained that to change a physical custody order in Nevada, a parent must show both (1) a substantial change in circumstances affecting the child's welfare and (2) that the change serves the child's best interest. The court held that William never argued that returning to the decree's original terms was a substantial change in circumstances, so he waived that point. It also explained that a recent Nevada Supreme Court decision, Romano v. Romano, overruled the part of the older Rivero decision that William relied on - meaning a court no longer has to first decide what kind of custody arrangement exists before deciding whether to modify it. Because William did not adequately show a substantial change in circumstances, his appeal failed.