North Carolina Divorce Lawyers Blog

Articles Tagged with appeals

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AMAN V. NICHOLSON, 2023-NCCOA-________ (2023). 

  1. Facts:  Plaintiff and Defendant are parents of a minor child. They separated in fall of 2019. Plaintiff filed for custody, and a temporary order was entered. The temporary order granted joint legal custody (decision making) and primary physical custody to Plaintiff, visitation to Defendant. It further required each party to obtain and exchange psychological evaluations and to attend counseling. Eventually, the custody matter was set for trial in spring of 2021. On the first day of trial, Defendant provided a list to Plaintiff containing three expert witnesses that he planned on calling to testify. Defendant also provided the witnesses’ CVs and the written reports of two of the witnesses.  Plaintiff objected and wanted to exclude the expert testimony. The trial court agreed, and entered an Order that excluded Defendant’s three expert witnesses from testifying. When trying to settle the record on appeal, Defendant wanted the CVs and written reports of the experts included, while Plaintiff objected to their inclusion. In judicial settlement of the record, the trial court ordered that the reports and CVs not be included. Defendant appealed. 

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Shebalin v. Shebalin, 2022-NCCOA-410.

Facts:

This appeal arose from the appointment of a parenting coordinator. Parenting coordinators are often appointed to child custody cases when the parents absolutely cannot get along. Plaintiff and Defendant had a minor child together who was at the center of their custody dispute. The trial court’s finding was that the case had become “high conflict” and thus a parenting coordinator was appointed for a term of years. In 2019, Defendant filed a motion to appoint again and was met with a motion to dismiss. At the hearing on these motions in 2020, the trial court again labeled the case high conflict, denied the motion to dismiss, and then set out a future date for the appointment of a coordinator. Continue reading →