As a commercial litigation firm, we spend most of our days litigating business disputes, contracts, shareholder fights, commercial leases, and the partition actions that arise when business partners or investors hold real property together and the venture sours. In those situations, partition is usually a dry exercise in accounting and division. It is the orderly unwinding of a co-ownership that has outlived its purpose. We handle a great many of them, and most look much alike.
This one was different.
The matter came to us not as a business dispute but as a human one. Our client was a man who, years after his marriage had ended, still owned a home jointly with his former spouse. When the marriage dissolved, the property they owned as husband and wife converted, by operation of law, into a tenancy in common, leaving each with an undivided one-half interest in a house that was underwater and in foreclosure at the time. His former spouse moved away and never returned to the home. For more than a decade, she made no payments, made no inquiries, and contributed nothing. He stayed in the home and paid every mortgage installment, every tax bill, every insurance premium, and every repair cost. He fought the home out of foreclosure and alone preserved it when most people would have walked away. He did so, as he testified, because he had been raised to believe that a man should own the roof over his head, and because he loved the house and meant to keep it.
Then, after the home had recovered substantial value, his former spouse returned and sued him to partition it and take half.
It was not the kind of matter that fills a commercial litigation docket, and it would have been easy to view it as too small or too far afield. But this case was different; our client had genuinely done everything right and asked for nothing he had not earned. He needed a firm prepared to fight as hard for his half as we would for any commercial client's millions.
And the case demanded exactly that. Far from the routine partition we ordinarily see, this one was contested at every turn. We litigated the admissibility of the opposing party's expert under the Daubert standard and succeeded in excluding testimony that lacked the reliability required by the law. We briefed and won the threshold legal question of which statutory framework applied, establishing that a post-dissolution dispute between co-owners proceeds under Chapter 64 rather than the family law provisions, which had no further application once the divorce was final. We proved our client's decade-long contributions and secured credit for them. We defeated an unpleaded claim for a rental-value offset. We prevailed on the method of sale and on the allocation of an encumbrance that belonged to the other side alone.
When the trial court entered judgment in our client's favor, the contest did not end. The opposing party pursued every available means of delay, including repeated motions for rehearing, motions to stay the sale, and two separate bankruptcy filings, each of which halted the sale under the automatic stay. We met each one. The sale was ultimately completed, and on appeal, the Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in full. For a client who had spent more than a decade quietly doing the right thing, the outcome was the vindication he deserved.
We are, and will remain, a business litigation firm. But the law is not only about commerce, and our obligation as advocates is not confined to clients with the largest matters. Now and then, a case comes to us that is really about a person, someone who is correct on the facts, correct on the law, and in genuine need of a capable advocate. When that case arrives, we are glad to take it. This was one of those, and we were proud to stand for him.
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