James Dooley

Experience & Education

James Dooley is a certified family law specialist whose disposition and experience gives him specialized expertise in moderating contentious litigants and cases.

James earned his chops at a high-end Beverly Hills family law litigation firm for almost a decade, but he has a predilection toward no-nonsense resolution of disputes. James’s default approach is to pursue settlement of issues in good faith, at the first reasonable opportunity taking into consideration the information, issues, parties, and attorneys. But because of his background, James is equipped to litigate. In the first half of his almost 20 years in practice, James achieved status as the go-to motion litigator for high-stakes issues in high-net-worth family law cases, and he perfected the use of software to enhance the fact management and analysis of his cases in the process.

Since relocating to San Diego in 2015, James has handled countless complex property characterization and valuation, income and support, reimbursement, breach of fiduciary duty, child custody, and domestic violence issues and cases. Most of James’s results have been achieved in settlement, but other more contentious matters have required adjudication in court, including the representative litigated cases described below.

Representative Litigated Cases

The following are example outcomes James has obtained in matters that required determination by the judge after a contested trial, motion, request for orders, or evidentiary hearing in court:

• 2025 – James obtained a $4,500 penalty against a former spouse who underpaid education costs and then attempted to obscure that he had done so.
• 2024-2025 - James obtained sanctions (twice) against an adverse spouse who attempted to discreetly sabotage the court-ordered sale of a property he was occupying.
• 2024 – James obtained an award for a 14% increase in child support to be paid by a business owner who had filed a request to decrease child support, after the “expert” testimony submitted by the support payor about the financial difficulties of the business buckled under scrutiny.
• 2024 - James obtained a sanction of $7,213 against an adverse spouse for abuse of discovery after the spouse pursued a premature expert deposition to the point of a motion hearing.
• 2023 - James obtained a sanction of $16,600 against an adverse spouse for failure to comply with disclosure obligations and abuse of discovery.
• 2023 - James obtained a decrease in the temporary spousal support to be paid by a business owner to $20,000 monthly from the $30,000 it had been after the support recipient pursued an increase to $50,000 monthly to a 5-day hearing with expert testimony.
• 2021 – James obtained orders requiring an adverse spouse who had disguised income and assets to pay sanctions of $100,000, need-based attorney’s fees of $500,000, and 25 months of retroactive spousal support.
• 2020 - James obtained an award of need-based litigation fees of $750,000 for a client who had faced more than a year of intense litigation by an adverse spouse represented by several law firms.
• 2020 – James prevailed on four of four motions (that yielded substantive orders) in a single high-stakes discovery proceeding, resulting in orders requiring disclosure and discovery of key information and $26,000 in sanctions against the adverse spouse.
• 2018-2019 - James defended a tentative order requiring disgorgement of a court-appointed expert’s fee for services, after the expert embarked on litigation to thwart enforcement of the order, including pursuing an unsuccessful appeal of the denial of an Anti-SLAPP motion.
• 2017 - James obtained sanctions of $170,000 against an adverse spouse for uncooperative litigation conduct in a divorce case.
• 2017 - James obtained a judgment for a buy-out, instead of an in-kind division, of marital stock in a start-up company at a substantially reduced, date-of-separation valuation, with the stockholder spouse (James’s client) later receiving all of the eight-figure increase in stock value associated with an acquisition deal.
  

Thought Leadership

James is a thought leader in family law, regularly contributing pieces for publication and presenting at seminars on trending topics, including through the San Diego Family Law Bar Association. Some recent contributions follow.

• “Case Updates 2021,” SDFLBA Winter Seminar, December 2021.
• “Coercive Control Comes to California,” SDFLBA Brown Bag, February 2021.
• “Marriage Story Will Be Remembered as an Amicable Divorce if SB 1141 Passes,” Times of San Diego, July 2020.
• “Changing Spousal Support and Child Support During the Covid-19 Crisis,” Procopio News and Resources, March 2020.
• “You May Be Owed Child or Spousal Support on Stock Options and Not Know it; Or You May be the One that Owes it,” Linked In, October 2019.
• “Evidence in the Age of Uber, Instagram, and Apple Pay,” SDFLBA Brown Bag, May 2019.
• “Machine Testimony and Hearsay – Litigating in the 21st Century,” Enright Inns of Court, March 2018.
• “How a Red-Light Camera Case May Help You Overcome a Sanchez Objection,” ACFLS Family Law Specialist, March 2018.
• “We Should End Inadvertent Submissions to Jurisdiction,” Daily Journal, October 2017.

Services Provided and Offered

• Preparing and reviewing prenuptial, postnuptial, and settlement agreements
• Establishing and modifying child custody and parenting plan agreements and orders
• Measuring income and earning capacity for child and spousal support obligations.
• Determining, modifying, and terminating spousal support obligations.
• Directing and critiquing the preparations of tracings and apportionments of separate property contributions to community property.
• Facilitating the valuation and division of assets, obligations, and liabilities.
• Opposing and obtaining domestic violence restraining orders.
• Advancing and opposing claims for reimbursements, credits, charges, reallocation of litigation costs, and sanctions based on inequitable expenditures during the pendency of the case, breaches of fiduciary duty, and uncooperative or other inappropriate conduct.
• Determining support arrears and otherwise addressing obligations claimed to require enforcement.
• Counseling in mediations and settlement negotiations.
• Resolving disputes as a stipulated discovery referee.

In The Community

Nearly all of James’s free time is spent tending to the activities of his two very active adolescent children, together with his San Diego-native wife.