Bresky Law recently won a motion for rehearing of an order of contempt that held our client in contempt for failure to pay an award of temporary attorney\u2019s fees. We are in the process of appealing the underlying order requiring our client to pay fees to opposing counsel. The parties were divorced in 2005 and the final judgment of dissolution incorporated a marital settlement agreement that detailed the former husband\u2019s alimony obligation. In 2011, the former wife filed a petition for modification of alimony seeking an increase in her alimony based on her allegations that the parties\u2019 financial circumstances had changed substantially. As part of her petition, the former wife requested an award of temporary attorney\u2019s fees. The trial court conducted a hearing and awarded the former wife $79,333 in attorney\u2019s fees for the modification litigation.<\/p>\n
Our client, the former husband, was unable to pay the temporary fee award due to a downturn in his business attributable to poor economic conditions. The former wife later filed a motion for contempt against our client based on his failure to pay. The trial court conducted a contempt hearing and then granted the former wife\u2019s motion to hold our client in contempt.<\/p>\n
Our firm filed a motion for rehearing of the order granting the former wife\u2019s motion for contempt. We stressed that civil contempt requires a court finding of both a party\u2019s willful non-compliance and that a party has the present ability to comply with the court\u2019s order. We argued that the trial court had failed to adequately identify the means by which our client could satisfy the purge amount, and also that the order of contempt was improperly based in part upon a prospective ability to pay because it assumed our client would be able to make future regular payments to the former wife\u2019s attorney. We argued that this framework ran contrary to the legal principle that contempt must be based upon a present ability to pay. We also argued that the trial court had failed to make findings that our client had equity in certain assets that the trial court had identified.<\/p>\n
The trial court held a hearing and agreed with our position. The trial court rendered an order granting the motion for rehearing of the order granting the former wife\u2019s motion for contempt. This positive outcome undid the order of contempt and prevented our client from being put in jail for not paying an attorney\u2019s fee award that he could not afford to pay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bresky Law recently won a motion for rehearing of an order of contempt that held our client in contempt for failure to pay an award of temporary attorney\u2019s fees. We are in the process of appealing the underlying order requiring our client to pay fees to opposing counsel. The parties were divorced in 2005 and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1812,1807,1806,1838],"tags":[1843],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-attorneys-fees","category-bresky-appellate-cases","category-family","category-notable-cases","tag-family-marital"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssrga.com\/appellate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}