Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Patricio Hernandez and Amber Frithiof are the parents of two children born in 2006 and 2007. After years of litigation over conservatorship and support, temporary orders made Frithiof sole managing conservator, barred Hernandez from contacting the children, and required him to pay $1,750 per month in child support. Hernandez stopped paying support in December 2022, the same month he was convicted of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison.
Following hearings in 2023, the trial court ordered Hernandez to pay lump sums covering support until the younger child’s emancipation, including $38,500 in child support and $26,400 in medical and dental support. It also awarded Frithiof $55,000 in attorney’s fees—$20,000 enforceable as child support and $35,000 enforceable as a civil judgment. Findings entered after an appellate abatement instead identified the proper support totals as $33,950 in child support and $18,600 in medical support.
The Court’s Holding
The Third Court of Appeals held that the trial court abused its discretion by failing to reduce child and medical support after the older child reached majority. Consistent with Frithiof’s remittitur motion and the trial court’s later findings, the appellate court modified the judgment to require lump-sum payments of $33,950 in child support and $18,600 in medical support, affirming those awards as modified.
The court reversed the $55,000 attorney-fee award because the evidence was legally insufficient to establish the amount of reasonable and necessary fees. Although billing records identified dates, timekeepers, hours, rates, and charges, extensive redactions frequently concealed the particular services performed. Counsel’s testimony did not fill those gaps. Because Frithiof nevertheless presented more than a scintilla of evidence that she incurred some reasonable and necessary fees, the court remanded the fee issue for further proceedings rather than rendering a take-nothing judgment. It did not decide Hernandez’s remaining challenges to findings concerning alleged harassment, asset concealment, and litigation tactics because those findings could be revisited on remand.
Key Takeaways
- A support order covering multiple children must account for the reduction in support when an older child reaches majority.
- Heavily redacted billing records may be legally insufficient when they prevent the factfinder from identifying the particular legal services performed and assessing whether the claimed fees were reasonable and necessary.
- When some evidence supports entitlement to attorney’s fees but not the amount awarded, the appropriate remedy may be reversal and remand for new fee proceedings rather than rendition of a take-nothing judgment.
Why It Matters
The decision underscores that Texas fee claimants must provide enough task-specific evidence to satisfy the lodestar requirements, even when billing records contain dates, hours, rates, and totals. Redactions that obscure what counsel actually did can prevent meaningful review of whether the work and time charged were reasonable and necessary.
It also illustrates the distinction between preserving a segregation objection and challenging evidentiary sufficiency. Hernandez forfeited his complaint that enforcement and modification fees were not segregated by failing to object at trial, but he could raise the sufficiency of the fee evidence for the first time on appeal from the bench trial.