Legal Question in Family Law in Texas

Based upon the facts you have provided it is extremely unlikely that you could set aside the property division and/or ask the court to reconsider the settlement. Given that you had an attorney at the mediation it is very difficult to prove that you did not have the opportunity to make an informed and reasoned decision about the terms of the mediated settlement before you agreed to it. You would have to show that your attorney purposefully or negligently acted against your interests. A friendship between your attorney and the mediator would not prove anything. Many attorneys are friends with other attorneys, even attorneys that regularly represent adverse parties. Your attorney may even have a good argument that he or she encouraged selection of that mediator because your attorney thought the relationship would cut in your favor. Your ex-spouse likely had a property interest in your pension and would have received a share of it even if your attorney and the mediator had no relationship or even an adverse relationship.

What it sounds like is that you accepted a settlement and now that circumstances have changed after the agreement was struck you want to go back and change it. If you did not like the deal or your attorney then your remedy was to reject the mediated settlement and fire your attorney.

The big exception here is if the pension division was awarded as spousal support/spousal maintenance. If that is how it was structured then you may have some options to lower or eliminate that part of the ordered agreement.

As I only have what you have written, hypothetically, if the order was entered in Texas, a qualified litigation attorney could perform legal research to see if there is a legal basis to go back to the court for review. If there is a legal way to go back and have the order reviewed, the petition will be drafted and filed. However, you will need to weigh the cost of this adventure vs. what you will owe him in the future, for if there is a legal basis to go back to court, this effort could exceed in legal fees what you owe him based on the order entered.

Goldstein & Scopellite, PC has qualified divorce lawyers and litigation attorneys located at either one of our law offices located in Dallas, Texas and Tucson, Arizona - Please see our websites at www.LawyersDallas.com and www.Lawyers-Tucson.com for more information or to contact us.