Law Week got announcements from local firms that approximately 60 individual attorneys were listed by Super Lawyers for family law practices and close to 35 individual attorneys were listed for labor and employment law.
More generally this year, we received announcements from more than 30 firms that nearly 300 attorneys locally made the cut for Super Lawyers 2025.
We analyzed some of the trends they’ve been tracking in their respective practice areas for the next year.
Family Law Trends
Colorado is approaching its first full year of having its inaugural class of licensed legal professionals, or LLPs, assisting with family law cases. Family law Super Lawyers told Law Week the new program seems to be going well so far in practice.
Diane Wozniak, a partner at Holland & Hart, said the state’s new LLP program is increasing access to justice for Coloradans who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an attorney. Taft family law attorney and partner Jordan Fox said the program has successfully expedited some of the more simple cases in the state’s court system.
The state’s new LLP exam, which was first administered last June, has a main family law section that takes around four and a half hours, with two short answer questions that are 90 minutes total. The ethics section is shorter, with applicants facing 45 multiple-choice questions in an hour and a half time frame.
Last April, Law Week reported that to qualify for the exam, the Colorado Supreme Court approved two paths. The first path involves a mixture of education and work experience. On the education side, an applicant must hold a law degree, an associate’s degree in paralegal studies, a bachelor’s degree in paralegal studies, a bachelor’s degree in any subject that includes a paralegal certificate or 15 hours of paralegal studies or a professional law degree from a law school in a country other than the U.S. and an LL.M. degree. They must also have completed an ethics class specific to LLPs or lawyers.
An applicant needs to have also worked at least 1,500 substantive law-related hours, with at least 500 of those hours in family law. These hours must have been worked in the three years prior to their LLP application.
The second path doesn’t have an education or ethics class requirement but it significantly increases the work experience needed. To qualify for this path, an applicant must have completed at least 4,500 substantive law-related hours within five years of the application submission. 1,500 of those hours must have been focused on Colorado family law. There’s also a recency requirement for those hours —1,500 total law hours and 500 family law hours completed in the three years before the application.
The LLP program in Colorado has been under discussion for a number of years. The current iteration of the program has robust licensure requirements and the exam and licensure paths factor in feedback from attorneys, judges and nonattorneys alike. Volunteer attorneys also developed the six-hour LLP exam focusing on core competency in line with the LLP Rules of Professional Conduct.
It seems the years of discussion and collaborative work have paid off for the state’s new LLPs.
“Colorado judges are applauding LLPs for their professionalism in the courtroom and the efficiencies they are creating for the courts,” Wozniak told Law Week.
“The LLP program has been able to expedite some of the cases coming before the [court], which in turn will hopefully provide our judiciary with more time for the contested cases,” Fox told Law Week. “The dissolution process is difficult to navigate, and LLPs are able to serve as guides for many participants in this process.”
Fox said that in general, he’s seeing more complex family law cases emerge.
Fox noted he’s starting to see more disputes between parties along with an increase in cases of abuse and neglect in his family law practice. He also noted that custody arrangements seem to be growing more challenging for both parties.
“The need to travel for employment or education is becoming more of a reality,” Fox said. “Job layoffs or employer consolidations make this a reality which can have significant impacts on parenting arrangements.”
In terms of other family law trends, social media seems to continue to serve as a support tool for parties in custody disputes. Fox noted that, while the use of social media in cases like this began some time ago, many spouses are tracking the other’s posts on social media and using them to support claims about lifestyle and parenting.
“A good warning for all participants in the process is to remember that everything you post is a potential exhibit,” Fox said.
Cynthia Ciancio, founding shareholder at Ciancio Ciancio Brown, P.C., told Law Week social media has played a huge role in the family law industry.
“Initially it started showing up a lot when Facebook [took] off,” Ciancio said. “At that point we began seeing an uptick in divorce filings because some spouses were having affairs with old flames they connected with on that platform (or other similar platforms).”
She added the trend hasn’t gotten any better over time.
“Social media also has become a major source of ‘evidence’ for parties and lawyers in domestic relations cases,” Ciancio added. “With technology today, people need to beware that very little, if anything, is truly private and they should also beware that recordings and photographs are all much more prevalent and used in divorce and custody cases.”
Colorado is a single-party state for recordings, Ciancio noted, and as long as the person doing the recording is a party to the discussion, it’s legal.
Ciancio also said she’s seen a trend of judicial officers leaning toward a presumption of 50/50 parenting time and decision-making arrangements.
“While there’s not supposed to be a ‘presumption of 50/50’ in Colorado, it seems many judicial officers still tend to lean that direction — probably because of the simplicity of it,” Ciancio said. “Knowing this trend, we lawyers are encouraging our divorce and custody clients to agree to 50/50 parenting time and decision-making agreements in order to avoid the unnecessary and often-wasted costs of litigating such issues. Unless there’s a very strong reason, such as serious substance, domestic or child abuse, we tend to believe, in most instances that courts will award 50/50 ‘custody’ these days.”
For larger trends, Ciancio said family law attorneys seemingly need to know a little bit about everything to stay ahead of issues impacting families.
“The ‘bad economy’ of late and other times historically has increased our business, as people tend to resort to divorce when financial times are hard for them,” Ciancio told Law Week. She noted that turbulent financial markets, employment conditions and other social factors impact clients and courts in family law proceedings.
“It’s true when they say that divorce lawyers truly need to know a little about everything, it’s certainly not just about ‘pots and pans,’” Ciancio said.
Employment Law Trends
Locally, there’s been a lot of movement in labor and employment law over the past few years. The state in 2024 expanded the Colorado Privacy Act to include biometric data, which included a collection, storage and policy creation requirement for employers. Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission formally banned noncompetes last year, joining laws the state already had on the books about the labor practice.
Steven Suflas, a partner at Holland & Hart, said that nationally, a reinvigorated organized labor trend is likely to continue “notwithstanding the change in White House attitudes.”
“Unions have the highest favorability ratings in the Gallup polls since the 1960s, unions are having success organizing demographic groups where they have historically struggled, i.e. younger and female workers and workers of color, and unions are having success in industries where they have historically struggled, i.e retail and tech,” Suflas told Law Week. “So, I think we will continue to see aggressive union organizing, both locally and nationally, for the foreseeable future.”
Locally, unions are more complicated than in other states. Colorado is currently the only state in the country with a second election requirement for unions.
The second union election covers the union-security clause in the Colorado Labor Peace Act, and it sets a 75% threshold to pass, compared to the simple majority required in the first election — a requirement set by federal law.
In the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers advanced a bill that would remove the state’s second election requirement for unions. Senate Bill 25-005 passed a third House reading with no amendments on May 6, but didn’t make it out of both chambers during the session as it adjourned the following day.