Colorado’s second-highest court on Thursday reversed a Douglas County judge’s decision to impose more than $850,000 in sanctions on a pair of plaintiffs and their lawyer without explaining why the amount was justified.

A three-judge Court of Appeals panel noted there are multiple legal tools available for imposing sanctions for a lawyer or litigant’s conduct. But each method requires justification based on factual findings — something that appeared nowhere in District Court Judge Andrew Baum’s orders.

“In the absence of any explanation as to the legal basis for its orders, we cannot assess the propriety of the court’s decision,” wrote Judge Christina F. Gomez in the Aug. 7 opinion.

The underlying case involved a longstanding dispute over property access between neighbors in rural Douglas County. In 2014, the Brinkerhoff and Thurber families reached a settlement agreement over the contested land. However, the agreement depended upon the cooperation of a third family, the Ewings, who were not a party to the underlying court case.

The dispute persisted, but a judge believed the settlement agreement was not a lost cause.

Then, in 2020, the Brinkerhoffs and their company, Jefferson Park Development, LLC, learned the Thurbers had withheld key portions of emails from years earlier in which one member of the Ewing family considered the settlement agreement “dead.”

Then-District Court Judge David Stevens became furious at the Thurbers’ attorney, Jeffrey C. Keiffer.

“How do you possibly think this doesn’t affect the integrity of why this whole building is here?” Stevens said. “How do I know there aren’t hundreds of other redactions or additions for that matter?”

Stevens separately scolded Keiffer for misrepresenting that the Brinkerhoffs did not a oppose a motion he filed, when in reality they did.

“Of probably over 100,000 motions it has dealt with, this Court has only seen such a misrepresentation once before, perhaps 4-5 years ago, from a first year attorney,” Stevens wrote in January 2022. Stevens’ message to attorney regulators was, “‘whatever counsel’s level of experience, how did he think he’d get away with such a misrepresentation?’ One similarly scratches their head here. It doesn’t take a very vivid imagination to start recognizing the enormously unproductive waste of time for all concerned here.”

Months later, in fully resolving the case, Stevens once again referenced the altered email evidence, saying his prior decision-making was based on “incomplete information” that the Thurbers and Keiffer “concealed.”

“These non-disclosures caused a tremendous waste of Court resources and interfered with the natural progression of the history related to these properties not to mention the litigation,” he wrote.

The Brinkerhoffs and their company, JPD, then asked for attorney fees and costs based upon the other side’s conduct. Combined, they sought $857,945 from the Thurbers and Keiffer.

In a pair of July 2023 orders, Baum, who inherited the case after Stevens retired, granted the amount without elaboration and without a hearing. He clarified later that he based his decision on the case history and the information submitted with the request.

“No further factual findings are necessary,” he concluded.

The Thurbers and Keiffer appealed. They pointed out there were three paths for imposing sanctions:

• Colorado law, which requires that an attorney or litigant “expanded the proceeding by other improper conduct”

• The rules of civil procedure, which require “reasonable notice and an opportunity to be heard” before a finding of an evidentiary violation

• A judge’s “inherent power,” which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, requires “a causal link between misconduct and fees”

“I think it’s a little bit hard for us to assess whether the trial court erred or not without sort of knowing the legal and factual basis,” observed Judge Katharine E. Lum during oral arguments to the appellate panel last month.

“We’re not arguing for kind of a holiday or for you to reach a conclusion that there was no lawyer misconduct,” said attorney Troy R. Rackham, representing the Thurbers and Keiffer. Instead, Baum had simply imposed the sanction in the wrong way.

The appellate panel agreed.

“It’s possible that the trial court granted the motions for sanctions on one or more of these grounds,” wrote Gomez. But “regardless of which legal basis (or bases) the court may have intended to rely on, it needed to make some factual findings to justify the sanctions ordered.”

The panel directed Baum to redo his sanctions orders.

The case is Brinkerhoff et al. v. Thurber et al.