Grant P. Bursek

I worked with a client who both her and her husband were Russian.  They got married in Russia, and before they got married, they signed a prenup, which had a Russian choice of law provision.  This means that if the validity/enforceability of the prenup is challenged, the judge presiding over the hearing is required to use Russian law to determine the if the agreement is enforceable.  My client and her husband were living in Jefferson County at the time we started the divorce proceedings.  As part of the divorce proceedings, my client challenged the validity of her Russian premarital agreement. Now our judge in Jefferson county does not know anything about Russian domestic relations law, just as I do not know anything about Russian family law.  To help educate both myself and out judge, I ended up hiring a family law attorney who lived and practiced in Moscow to educate both myself and the judge about Russian law as it pertains to both the formation of premarital agreements and when courts in Russia will find that a premarital agreement is invalid or not enforceable.  Through this process, one big difference between Russian family law and family law here in Colorado is that a court in Russia can find a premarital agreement is not enforceable if, under the terms of the agreement, one spouse gets effectively all of the property in a divorce.  In this case, after a very long hearing where our Russian family attorney testified into the very early hours of the morning because of the time difference between Colorado and Moscow, our judge in Jefferson county found that the premarital agreement my client signed back in Moscow was not valid under Russian law.   The practical effect of the court’s ruling in this case meant that the couple’s multi-million-dollar martial estate now needed to be divided under Colorado law.  Had the court found the premarital agreement enforceable, my client would have received less than 5% of the total value of the estate.  This was a huge win for my client.

I represented a stay-at-home in a divorce case.  The parties were getting divorced after being married for more than 20 years.  The husband in this case worked in the oil and gas industry, and while his income changed year-to-year, he earned a minimum of $3 million dollars a year.  Even though the parties had been married for almost the entire adult lives and my client had not worked in over fifteen years, it was Husband’s position that he should not have to pay my client any spousal maintenance.  When we went to trial, I figured that he would soften that position at least a little bit, but true to his form throughout the case, when he testified during the permanent orders hearing, he told the judge that he did not believe he should have to pay his wife any alimony.  Since he earned so much money, the statutory guidelines were not applicable.  I worked with my client before her testimony to come up with a reasonable amount of monthly spousal maintenance based upon her actual financial needs.  Before the hearing we went through her monthly spending and broke it out between necessary and discretionary spending, and when my client testified at the permanent orders hearing she gave the court the amount of monthly spousal maintenance she was requesting and also provided the judge a detailed breakdown of how she arrived at the number.  When we got the court’s written permanent orders the court awarded her the exact amount of monthly spousal maintenance she requested, which was significantly more than Husband’s requested maintenance.

Seven years ago, before the recent changes to law regarding domestic violence and coercive control, I represented a young mom in parental responsibilities case.    The parties were not married, and they had one child together who was just an infant at the time of the case.  During her relationship with the opposing party, her partner never hit her, because subjected her to a persistent campaign of coercive controlling behavior.  As often happens in these situations, the opposing party was very put together and controlled when he met with the CFI and denied all of my client’s claims of psychological and emotional abuse. The CFI, in his report, did not find my client’s claims credible, and recommended that the parties share joint decision making responsibility for the baby, and after a short step-up period, have equal parenting time with the child.  In preparing for the permanent orders hearing, I had my client provide me all her text messages with the opposing party, which were hundreds of pages of text messages.  As I was reviewing  all of these text messages, I found a number of messages the opposing party sent to my client where he admitted to the exact behavior my client had accused him of, and he denied when meeting with the CFI.  At the permanent orders hearing when testify, the opposing party again denied all of my client’s claims.  I then used his text messages to impeach him on the stand.  The judge when entering his orders did not follow the CFI’s recommendations and provided my client with sole decision making authority and awarded my client 70% of the parenting time with the child.  The court relied on the text messages we found to support his decision.