Practice Area · The Process & After
Attorney fees & costs.
Colorado treats legal fees as part of the economics of the divorce itself: courts can shift them, advance them, and — when litigation is abused — award them as a sanction. Understanding all three changes how a case is planned.
Fee-Shifting
The level-playing-field statute.
Under C.R.S. § 14-10-119, after considering the financial resources of both parties, the court may order one party to pay a reasonable amount of the other’s fees and costs — including for work done before filing and after judgment, payable directly to the attorney. The Colorado Supreme Court has explained the premise: like maintenance, a fee award exists so the lesser-earning spouse can litigate without undue economic hardship, standing on something like equal footing. It is equitable, not punitive — and it applies before the decree, at permanent orders, and in post-decree litigation.
Interim Fees & Expert Costs
Funding the case while it runs.
Colorado courts have authority to advance prospective fees and costs during the litigation to diminish the advantage one spouse holds over the other — and that includes expert costs. Appellate decisions have upheld six-figure advances covering both counsel and the appraisal work needed to trace and value one spouse’s significant property. In a case where one spouse controls the balance sheet, an early, well-supported interim fee motion is often the single most consequential filing of the first ninety days.
Fees as Sanction
When conduct, not need, drives the award.
A second, sharper statute runs alongside: C.R.S. § 13-17-102 mandates fee awards against a party or attorney whose position was substantially frivolous, groundless, or vexatious, or who unnecessarily expanded the proceeding — including through discovery abuse. Colorado’s mandatory-disclosure rule carries its own teeth: courts have considerable discretion to sanction incomplete or late disclosures under C.R.C.P. 16.2. Both tracks can operate in the same case. The practical lesson cuts both ways: litigation conduct has a price, and a spouse facing scorched-earth tactics is not without recourse.
What “Reasonable” Means
How the number is actually tested.
Courts test fees against the lodestar — hours reasonably expended times a reasonable hourly rate — refined by the factors in the Rules of Professional Conduct and then apportioned by the parties’ relative financial circumstances. The requests that survive scrutiny are built on contemporaneous, specific billing records; block-billed and vague entries get cut, and clerical work billed at attorney rates does not hold. Fee litigation is won with evidence, not adjectives — affidavits, records, and where contested, testimony.
The rest of this chapter.
How a Colorado divorce actually moves: temporary orders, mediation and litigation, privacy, and what happens when an order has to be modified, enforced, or appealed.
- Divorce in Coloradohow the process actually works→
- Mediation & Litigationsettle from strength→
- Privacy & Discretionengineered from the first filing→
- Emergency & Protection Ordersthe automatic injunction, and urgent relief→
- Modificationswhich door you knock on matters→
- Enforcement & Contemptorders are only as good as their enforcement→
- Appealswon at trial, by the record→
- Common Law Marriagewhether a marriage exists at all→
- Legal Separationsame process, different decree→
- Temporary Ordersthe first ninety days, governed→
- Attorney Fees & Costsfee-shifting and the level playing fieldYou are here
- Protection Ordersthe shield, and the defense against it→
Engagement
The economics of the case include the cost of the case. Plan both.
A consultation is a scheduled working session — in person in Greenwood Village or by video — in which we go through your situation and I tell you what I would do. It is a paid meeting, not a free call and not a sales pitch; my assistant quotes the consultation fee when you schedule. There is no chatbot here: the contact form and the phone both reach my office, my assistant reviews every inquiry personally, and the meeting goes on my calendar. Please hold the confidential details until we have run a conflicts check.