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Appeals court hears child-support and attorney-fee dispute after family-court trial
Summary
Appellant argued the trial court used the wrong attributed income figure when calculating child support for a four-month period and that a $6,000 attorney-fee award was unsupported; appellee said the error is clerical and fee award was warranted by obstructive conduct at trial.
The Appeals Court heard argument in Loyosa v. Fabio (docket 24P0682), an appeal addressing a family-court child-support calculation and a post-trial award of attorney's fees.
Alan Loyosa, representing himself, argued that the trial judge used an incorrect attributed-income figure ($13.41 weekly) rather than the court's own finding of weekly earnings of $5.60 for a specific four-month period (December 2016'April 2017). Loyosa said that mistake materially inflated a child-support calculation for that interval and asked the court to vacate the $6,000 attorney-fee award entered against him.
Merrill Chin, counsel for the appellee, conceded the clerical error in the paragraph of the judgment and asked the court to affirm the attorney-fee award. Chin said the fee award was reasonable because Loyosa, proceeding pro se at the time, filed inaccurate financial statements, resisted stipulating to uncontested exhibits, and prolonged the trial'which ran four days instead of the one day he estimated'causing additional attorney time and expense.
The panel asked whether the error was a clerical/ministerial mistake (appropriate for remand or correction) or a substantive decision requiring findings, and whether the record supported the fee award under the statutory standard for attorney's-fee awards in domestic-relations cases. Loyosa argued his filings and mistakes were not obstructionist but the product of limited legal experience and lack of funds to hire counsel.
The court took the matter under advisement after argument. The transcript does not contain an appellate ruling.
