Claim For Attorney Fees Survives Dismissal of Complaint

Tennessee case summary on attorney’s fees.

Felicitas Hayes v. Christopher Daniel Scoggin

The mother and father in this Shelby County, Tennessee, case had four children at the time of their 2013 California divorce.   Over the next six years, they were back in court in four states regarding various custody disputes.

The father moved to North Carolina with the children in 2015, and a court in that state modified the order on the grounds not only of the husband’s move, but of the mother’s move to Indiana.  The North Carolina court awarded primary custody to the father, and after retiring from the Marine Corps, he moved with the children to Tennessee.

In 2018, the mother brought an action in Tennessee to enroll the judgment, and the father contested the relief sought by the mother.  Ultimately, the mother moved to dismiss the Tennessee case.  Later that year, the father brought another action in Tennessee to modify the summer parenting schedule.  As part of that action, he sought attorney’s fees, which included the fees from the mother’s earlier action.   The mother objected on the grounds that the father should have sought these fees in the earlier case.  But the trial court noted that the mother had dismissed the case without prejudice.  It therefore held that the doctrine of res judicata did not prevent the father from raising the issue in the later proceeding.  The trial court granted the father over $11,000 in attorney’s fees, and the mother appealed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals.

The appeals court cited an earlier Tennessee Supreme Court case and noted that the purpose of the doctrine of res judicata is to promote finality in litigation and to prevent against multiple lawsuits.

The appeals court noted that the father, in his answer to the first petition, did request attorney’s fees.  It zeroed in on the mother’s motion to dismiss, which reserved her right to adjudicate the matter at a later date.  Therefore, there was no final judgment in the first action, and the father, like the mother, was free to relitigate the contested issues.

For this reason, the Court of Appeals held that the father was free to litigate the issue of attorney’s fees.  It therefore affirmed the lower court’s judgment.  It assessed the costs of the appeal against the mother and remanded the case for collection of those costs.

No. W2019-00057-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Jul. 25,  2019).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see The Tennessee Divorce Process: How Divorces Work Start to Finish.