On August 2, 2021 at the Advanced Family Law Course in San Antonio, Texas, Chris Wrampelmeier, along with co-author the Hon. Karl Hays, received the Joseph W. McKnight Best Family Law CLE Article award from the Family Law Section of the State Bar. Each year a committee reads every article written for the Advanced Family Law Course, Marriage Dissolution Institute, New Frontiers in Marital Property Course, and the December continuing legal education (CLE) course. The committee then selects the best paper from the many presented at those seminars. Mr. Wrampelmeier’s paper was entitled You Presume Too Much: Overcoming Fit Parent, Visitation, and Child Support Presumptions. Judge Hays and Mr. Wrampelmeier presented their paper at the Advanced Trial Skills for Family Lawyers 2020 Course in December 2020, webcasted due to the pandemic.

Mr. Wrampelmeier is a frequent speaker at CLE courses. On July 17, 2021, he presented his paper, 2021 Changes to Discovery and the Impact on Family Cases, at the Texas Bar College Summer School 2021 in Galveston, Texas. On August 4, 2021, he presented his paper, Reimbursement and Reconstituted Estate, at the Advanced Family Law Course.

On December 10, 2020, Chris Wrampelmeier, along with the Hon. Karl Hays, Associate District Judge for Hays County, Texas, presented their paper entitled “You Presume Too Much: Overcoming Fit Parent, Visitation, and Child Support Presumptions” at the State Bar of Texas continuing legal education seminar “Advanced Trial Skills for Family Lawyers 2020.” In addition to a discussion of strategies for overcoming these family law statutory and case law presumptions, the presentation included a detailed discussion of the potential ramifications of the June 2020 Texas Supreme Court opinion in In re C.J.C., in which the Court recognized a fit parent presumption for suits affecting the parent-child relationship in which a nonparent seeks conservatorship or visitation rights. The fit parent presumption will make it much harder for courts to award nonparents those rights. Gabrielle Bechyne, a third-year law student at Texas Tech University and future Underwood Associate, helped research the paper.