Additional Information

We represented a husband residing in Oregon in a dissolution action with a Washington resident. The dispute concerned the residential schedule for the parties' fourteen-year-old daughter. As the father had not been involved in the child's life for almost two years and due to her domestic violence and drug abuse allegations, the mother sought to eliminate the father's access entirely. We were successful in re-establishing the father's role by securing for him residential time with his daughter.

We represented the wife in the dissolution of a 32 year marriage, where the parties had been physically separated for seventeen years. During the marriage, the parties acquired a home for which the mortgage had been paid off in 2006 as a result of the wife's payments. We successfully argued that the wife was entitled to a far greater share of the home, over the husband's argument that he deserved one-half of the community asset. The court ordered a 70/30 split of the community asset in the wife's favor, to give her full credit for payment made during the separation.

Working in concert with attorneys for the adoption agency and for the adoptive parents as well as the guardian ad litem for the baby boy, we successfully represented the birth father at the Superior Court, Court of Appeals, and the Washington State Supreme Court in enforcing the birth parents' adoption plan over the birth mother's belated attempt to revoke her consent to adoption by joining the Choctaw Indian Tribe.

In Vogt, we successfully eliminated the father's residential time as a result of his inappropriate conduct and due to his failure to abide by the court's pretrial orders. The result was upheld on appeal.

We represented a Swedish father in an expedited proceeding for return of the couple's minor son and daughter from Washington State to Sweden under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, 42 U.S.C. § 11601. Despite some conflicting evidence that the children were primarily American citizens, we succeeding in persuading the Court that the children's country of habitual residence was Sweden, making an order requiring their return to Sweden appropriate.

We represented the husband in a dissolution of a long-term marriage, in which the legally disabled wife sought maintenance of $1,400 a month for ten years and $1,000 a month for four years thereafter ($216,000). The court ordered maintenance of $1,200 a month for 60 months ($72,000), just slightly over the client's offer of $1,000 per month for sixty months.

Even though the mother was living with the parties' eight-year-old daughter in the family home after separation and adamantly wanted such arrangements to continue, we were able to obtain for the husband the former family home, together with primary residential care of the child through Mediation.

In a full-day mediation just before trial, the husband offered only $3,000 to satisfy our client's claim for a share of the modest equity in the family home and community commercial property. After analyzing the parties' assets, we could recommend accepting no less than $21,000 at mediation, but the husband refused. Our client was awarded $37,050 at trial. Based upon the husband's unreasonable trial position, the court also awarded our client over one-half of her attorney's fees from the other party, even though the parties' economic circumstances were roughly equal.

In an era when Washington courts did not easily support non-parents' custody claims, we assisted a non-family member in becoming sole legal custodian of a 14-year-old girl, where the parents had refused to perform critical parenting functions, including nutrition, housing, and school work.

We assisted our client, who was then eight months pregnant with the parties' second child, in obtaining, by restraining order, control over the parties' extensive business interests, after the husband had embarked on an affair and related drug and spending binge.

We prevailed for the client/wife on the core trial issue: an equal share of the husband's union pension and other property, not only from the five years of marriage, but for the five years preceding that, in which the wife successfully argued that the parties were in a marriage-like relationship that merited such an equal division. The result was significant because the concept of meretricious relationship was not fully developed at the time of trial. See Connell v. Francisco, 127 Wn.2d 339, 898 P.2d 831 (1995).