Divorce and custody counsel for Golden.

What a Golden divorce is usually about.

Golden’s money is in careers and in land. A faculty position or a research post at the School of Mines, an engineer at one of the labs or the energy companies along the corridor, a pension or a 403(b) built over twenty years, and stock from an employer down the road: Colorado treats the marital portion of all of it as marital, and dividing a pension or a retirement account takes a qualified domestic relations order drafted correctly, or the tax bill lands on the wrong spouse. Then the house. A Victorian in the historic district or an acre in Golden Gate Canyon bought fifteen years ago is often the largest asset in the case, frequently with a down payment or an improvement that came from one spouse’s family, and the increase in its value during the marriage is marital even when the property is not.

Golden also has more small businesses per block than most of the metro: a brewery, a bike shop, an outfitter, a consulting practice run from a home office. A company started during the marriage is marital even if only one spouse ever set foot in it, and the question is what it is worth and how one spouse keeps it while the other is paid fairly. More on Business Owner Divorce and Separate Property & Tracing.

Jefferson County District Court, in town.

Golden is the seat of Jefferson County, and the 1st Judicial District sits at the Jefferson Combined Court on Jefferson County Parkway, the county government complex on the hill south of downtown — a few minutes from anywhere in Golden and about thirty-five from my office in Greenwood Village. There is no separate family bench here: every district judge carries domestic cases alongside civil and criminal, the magistrates handle the preliminary domestic matters, and two family court facilitators run the initial status conferences. The district’s standing order routes certain questions to a district judge rather than a magistrate — relocation of the children, the validity of a prenuptial agreement, reopening a decree for nondisclosure — and keeps post-decree motions with the decree division for eighteen months. The court publishes its own spousal maintenance advisement worksheet, which is worth reading before the first conference. Note the Friday noon counter closing; the atrium drop box stays open until 5:30 p.m. The detail, and every other metro courthouse, is on the Denver Metro Family Courts page.

Custody in a town people do not leave.

Most Golden parents intend to stay in Golden, and most custody cases here are about a schedule that keeps the children in the same school and the same trails while two households take shape a mile apart. 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, in detail, because the plan that is vague about Sunday night is the plan that ends up back in court. When a parent’s job moves them — a lab, a mine, a university — the relocation rules decide the case, and they are strict. More on Parenting-Time Schedules and Relocation & Move-Away.

Related: Separate Property & Tracing  ·  Business Owner Divorce  ·  Real Estate Division  ·  Executive Compensation  ·  Parental Responsibilities
Nearby: Evergreen  ·  Boulder  ·  Cherry Creek  ·  Denver Metro Family Courts