Divorce and custody counsel for Cherry Hills Village.

What a Cherry Hills divorce is usually about.

Large lots on the Highline Canal, houses that have been in one family for a generation, a company or a medical or dental practice built over twenty years, and accounts that mix an inheritance with marital savings: the Cherry Hills file is a tracing problem before it is a division problem. The Census Bureau does not publish a median income or a median home value for the Village because both run past the top of its scale, and that is the practical point: the money here is old enough to have come from somewhere, and where it came from is the first question. Colorado divides marital property equitably, and separate property — what one spouse brought in or inherited — stays separate, but the increase in its value during the marriage is marital. Which is why the first month of a case like this is spent on records, not rhetoric.

The other constant is that neither spouse wants the file to be interesting. Court records are public; the way to keep a valuation, a trust, or a compensation package out of view is to plan for it from the beginning — private mediation, protective orders where they are justified, and settlement documents that do not recite more than they must. I have written about the limits and the tools on the Privacy & Discretion page.

Arapahoe County District Court, Centennial.

Cherry Hills Village is in Arapahoe County, so a case filed here goes to the 18th Judicial District at the Arapahoe County Justice Center on South Potomac Street in Centennial, about fifteen minutes away and ten from my office. The domestic docket there is dedicated — three district judges who hear only domestic relations cases, four domestic magistrates and a child-support magistrate — and the initial status conference is run by a family court facilitator, usually by Webex. Nothing filed in that court is private: the petition, the sworn financial statement and every motion are public records. The tools that keep a valuation or a trust out of the file are a private mediator instead of a courtroom, a protective order where the law allows one, and settlement documents that recite no more than they must, and each of them has to be set up at the beginning, not asked for after the fact. In my experience the magistrates handle temporary orders and mediation is ordered before nearly every contested hearing. The rest — addresses, hours, what to expect — is on the Denver Metro Family Courts page.

Custody when both parents intend to stay in the Village.

Most Cherry Hills custody cases are not about who is the better parent; they are about a schedule that keeps the children in the same school, the same activities, and the same friendships while two households take shape. Colorado’s best-interests factors include the physical proximity of the parents’ homes and each parent’s past pattern of involvement, and I build parenting plans around both — and around the travel schedule of a parent who runs a business. When a parent’s work makes a conventional week-on, week-off plan unrealistic, the answer is a plan drafted for that family, not a template. More on how I approach this on Custody for Executives & Business Owners.

Related: High-Asset Divorce  ·  Separate Property & Tracing  ·  Trust Interests  ·  Business Owner Divorce  ·  Parental Responsibilities
Nearby: Greenwood Village  ·  Castle Pines  ·  Lone Tree  ·  Denver Metro Family Courts