The decision, issued on 6 November 2026 by Division One of the Arizona Court of Appeals, upheld a lower court’s summary judgment in favour of lawyer Jennifer Mihalovich and her law firm, Stewart Law Group. The legal malpractice case began with a calculation error in Mikalacki’s 2021 divorce decree. The mistake listed a family debt as $100,000 less than the amount actually owed.
Because her lawyer missed a court deadline cannot receive compensation from the attorney, an Arizona appeals court has ruled, a woman who lost the chance to correct an error in her divorce judgment. The court found that Gordana Mikalacki had failed to prove that her former lawyer’s mistake caused her any direct financial loss.
She claimed that if the divorce decree had correctly listed the $200,000 loan, the entire debt would have been paid using money from the sale of the family home. Her appeal was registered under docket number 1 CA-CV 26-0178. Because of long-term financial problems, disability or death, the court also noted that Mikalacki had provided no reliable evidence showing that her former husband could not pay his half of the debt.
She also said she might have to take separate legal action against her former husband to recover his share. Tanner, the judges said that Mikalacki’s father, who provided the loan, was not bound by the mistake in the divorce court’s order. In her lawsuit, Mikalacki argued that her lawyer’s failure to meet the filing deadline had caused her direct financial harm. Instead, she argued that she was left at risk of paying more than her fair share. Mihalovich and Stewart Law Group asked the court to dismiss the case through summary judgment. They argued that Mikalacki had not suffered any actual financial loss directly caused by the missed deadline. Superior Court Judge Scott A. Blaney ruled in favour of the lawyers. He found that the error in the divorce decree had not changed the actual amount owed to Mikalacki’s father or her legal responsibility for the debt. After her case was dismissed and her request for a new trial was denied, Mikalacki appealed to the Arizona Court of Appeals. The court explained that a divorce decree can divide debts between former spouses, but it cannot change the rights of someone who is owed money by the couple.
Citing the earlier decision in Fleming v.
Since the decree assigned community debts on a 50-50 basis, Mikalacki still has the legal right to file a separate claim against her former husband and seek repayment of half of the full $200,000 loan. The court added that even if the missing $100,000 was treated as community debt that had not been properly assigned, Arizona law assumes that debts left out of a divorce agreement must be divided equally between both former spouses. The appeals court also explained that the original divorce decree was intended to divide the couple’s debts equally. Morrison in support of this position. The court rejected Mikalacki’s argument that having to seek repayment from her former husband amounted to financial harm caused by her lawyer’s mistake. Finding no legal error that justified changing the lower court’s decision, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the summary judgment dismissing the malpractice lawsuit. It also ordered that court costs be awarded to Mihalovich and Stewart Law Group.
The judges referred to the earlier ruling in Dressler v. It explained that if her former husband failed to pay his share in the future, that would be the result of his own actions, not the lawyer’s earlier failure to meet the court deadline.