A family court judge shouldn’t have accounted for the fact that a plaintiff was about to lose her job before deciding whether she had the means to pay for her own attorneys’ fees in a child custody case, a ...

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Plaintiffs alleged that defendants had failed to make necessary repairs to plaintiffs’ vehicle and had actually damaged the vehicle, and the trial court relied on plaintiff Burton’s affidavit – saying the vehicle was undriveable and had sustained $22,750 in damages ...

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  Where sentence structure and punctuation cause confusion, the state Court of Appeals stands ready to provide clarity. A three-judge panel did just that recently, unmuddling a comma-heavy statute and holding that state law does not authorize an award of ...

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Even though the respondent-board lacked the authority to discipline petitioner for his inspection of a swimming pool heater, G.S. § 6-19.1 does not authorize an award of attorney’s fees resulting from a disciplinary action by a licensing board. We reverse ...

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Raleigh lawyer Jonathan McGirt waited nearly five years for an appellate court to clarify whether interlocutory orders for attorneys’ fees in family law cases were immediately appealable under the substantial right exception. The exception gives a litigant an avenue to ...

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A divided North Carolina Court of Appeals panel has vacated an attorney’s fee award because the attorney’s affidavit offered no evidence about comparable fee rates in his field of practice, saying that the trial judge who ordered the award should ...

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The plaintiff-father failed to pay child support from 2014 until 2016, resulting in an arrearage of $12,483.18 and in the defendant-mother hiring an attorney and filing a motion to show cause. Plaintiff purged himself of contempt by writing a check ...

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Holding: A review of G.S. §§ 36C-10-1004, 6-21(2), and Belk v. Belk, 221 N.C. App. 1, 728 S.E.2d 356 (2012), convinces the court that no finding of egregious conduct is required for attorneys’ fees to be awarded under the Uniform ...

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RALEIGH (AP) The North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled that convicted criminals can dispute the cost for their court-appointed attorney with a judge if they’re told to pay up. The court said Jan. 16 that trial judges must tell ...

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State v. Friend (Lawyers Weekly No. 011-021-18, 13 pp.) (Richard Dietz, J.) Appealed from Catawba County Superior Court (Robert Sumner, J.) N.C. App. Holding: When the trial court is contemplating a money judgment against a criminal defendant for attorneys’ fees ...

Tagged with: attorney's fees