Articles Posted in Appeal Bench Trial Divorce

What is intentional underemployment?

Bob has a child with Mary. Bob makes $10,00,000 a year as a professional baseball player. Mary takes Bob to court for child support. Bob is in his baseball prime and could still play if he wanted. But Bob decides to retire from baseball and take up a job as a Tik Tok dancer that pays $10,000 a year. 

Bob believes that Texas child support calculations are based on income. Bob is mad about having to pay child support and wants to reduce the amount he pays to Mary. Bob thinks he would pay much less in child support on $10,000 a year vs $10,000,000. 

When someone decides to become a lawyer he or she must go through a rigorous process before becoming certified to practice law. It is required that he or she complete law school, which can take anywhere from to three or four years, and pass an extensive exam. During the course of study, prospective lawyers will learn civil procedure, criminal procedure, evidence, legal writing, and various other courses that will prepare them to sufficiently represent a client in the courtroom. Years of preparation and thousands of hours are spent for a person to prepare to be able to adequately represent another person. With all the criteria that must be met for a lawyer to represent another person in court, it would be unreasonable to expect people, without adequate education, to be successful in representing themselves in a courtroom. But, some people try to represent themselves in the courtroom with no legal assistance. This is what the legal field refers to as “pro se”, the Latin phrase meaning “for oneself”. Unfortunately, in some cases, people do so to no avail and Mr. Lares, in his appeal to the Fourth Court of Appeals Court, Lares v. Flores, found out just how difficult the process can be.

Why did Lares’ attempt to represent himself fail?

When a decision is made on a case a person can attempt to appeal the decision by claiming the original court made an error. When making an appeal there are certain rules of procedure that must be sufficiently followed for the court to consider your appeal. Lares had several issues that he wanted to appeal from the trial court. He claimed the trial court erred by failing to provide him notice of the hearing, denying his motion for continuance, refusing to hold his ex wife, Flores, in contempt, and believing his ex wife’s testimony over his because he was incarcerated at the time. Lares needed to prepare an adequate brief of these issues that followed the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure. Lawyers are trained to know these rules and expected to follow them when they are submitting a brief to the court. If the brief is not adequate, the court will wave the complaints made and the appeal will not be considered.

You have just finished a long bench trial in your divorce and you do not feel that the trial court was correct in its division of your assets and liabilities.  In fact, you feel that the judge was completely wrong and you got the short end of the stick.  So, you wonder what you can do about it.  You absolutely can appeal, but you have a short window frame in order to do so and it is imperative you take certain steps in appealing.

The 7th District Court of Appeals in Amarillo makes this fact abundantly clear in Kenneth Dale Rodgers, Appellant vs. Mary Elaine Rodgers, Appellee in determining whether or not (a) “the trial court abused its discretion in the division of the property” which (b) “materially affected a just and right division of the marital estate.”   In that case, the husband was very unhappy with the property division and he appealed.  However, the husband failed to request findings of fact and conclusions of law from the trial court within the required amount of time. Therefore, the appellate court had no idea what the basis of the trial court’s ruling was and was forced to go along with it.  This is because, as the Court of Appeals held, you must request findings of fact and conclusions of law from the trial court and the trial court must then file those within a certain period of time. This allows the Court of Appeals to determine why the trial court held what it held.  The record sometimes helps, but findings of fact and conclusions of law are obviously more solid and preferred by the appellate courts.

When you have a bench trial (trial before judge, not jury), Texas Rules of Civil Procedure Rules 296 and 297 mandate that you must file your request for findings of fact and conclusions of law from the trial court “within twenty days after the judgment is signed” and then the trial court must “file its findings of fact and conclusions of law within twenty days after a timely request has been made.”  If you fail to do this, then “the trial court is presumed to have made all findings of fact necessary to support its judgment, and it must be affirmed on any legal theory that is supported by the evidence.” Rodgers v. Rodgers.

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