Maryland Divorce Lawyer Blog
Divorce is often an extremely painful time. Different individuals respond to the trauma of divorce in various ways — some more constructive than others. One way of responding to your spouse’s decision to end your marriage that is never helpful is to ignore it (or ignore aspects of the legal case that require you to respond.) Failing to participate in your divorce case can only serve to harm you, including in terms of substantial economic losses. Rather than hiding away from your divorce and your divorce case, seek out an experienced Maryland divorce lawyer instead.
A recent divorce case in Annapolis offers many pointers about what not to do when your spouse initiates divorce proceedings.
The divorce involved a young couple with one child. The husband was in the Navy, while the wife worked as a proposal analyst for a software company. During the litigation, the wife did not comply with multiple “reasonable discovery requests” the husband made. The wife “simply ignored them and/or didn’t respond, and/or didn’t update any discovery responses she did make,” according to the trial court.
At the matter’s conclusion, even though the husband earned more than the wife, the trial court decided not to grant a monetary award to either spouse and to order the wife to pay more than $6,600 of the husband’s attorney’s fees.
The wife appealed but lost.
Awards of Attorney’s Fees
The Family Law Article allows judges to “order either party to pay to the other party an amount for the reasonable and necessary expense of prosecuting or defending the proceeding.” When deciding whether or not to order a spouse to pay a portion of their spouse’s attorney’s fees in a family law case, the trial court must consider:
- the financial resources and financial needs of both parties
- whether there was substantial justification for prosecuting or defending the proceeding
In this couple’s case, the wife ignored or failed to respond to multiple discovery requests and failed to update the responses she did submit. Those facts supported the trial court’s finding that the husband had substantial justification for his litigation steps (and the attorney’s fees he racked up.) Based on those facts plus the court’s finding that the spouses were on roughly equal economic footing, the award of fees was appropriate.
According to the Appellate Court, inadequate discovery responses were not the wife’s only problem — she also failed to provide the information necessary to support her own claims. In opposing the trial court’s monetary award ruling, the wife argued that she was entitled to an award because her husband’s income was “approximately twice as much as” hers. She also claimed that the trial court did not “include all of [the husband’s] income” when deciding the monetary award issue. The problem the wife faced, according to the appeals court, was that she never identified “what income the court failed to include in its calculations.”
This case illustrates that a failure to manage and interact with a family law proceeding in this state can be very costly for you — both in terms of being forced to pay certain costs (like attorney’s fees) and lost opportunities to receive payments like monetary awards. Do not let that happen to you. Make sure you have the powerful legal representation you need at every step of the process. When it comes to your divorce, the knowledgeable Maryland family law attorneys at Anthony A. Fatemi, LLC have the skills and experience necessary to help you navigate the process effectively and successfully. Contact us today at 301-519-2801 or via our online form to set up your consultation.