Indiana panel: trial court cannot cut an association's fees without a hearing
Indiana panel: trial court cannot cut an association's fees without a hearing
2026-09-10 · Indiana · Courts
What happened. On 31 October 2025 the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed a lien-foreclosure judgment in favour of a homeowners association on two independent grounds, both of which concerned money the trial court had declined to award.1
The case is Treyburn Lakes Homeowners Association, Inc. v. Solomon L. Scott, No. 25A-CC-646 — a published opinion from a panel of Judges May, Mathias and Bradford.
The posture
Treyburn Lakes had already obtained three personal judgments against a delinquent owner between 2016 and 2021. Each of those judgments included an award of attorney fees, and each remained unpaid. The association then moved to foreclose the lien securing them.
The trial court granted the foreclosure — but wrote the decree in a way that left the association materially worse off than its paper judgments suggested. It excluded the unpaid attorney-fee components of the three earlier judgments from the amount secured. Then, without holding a hearing, it cut the association's fee request in the current action from $5,754 to roughly $1,424, a reduction of about 75 percent.
Both cuts were error
On the first point, the panel held that where the declaration and IC 34-55-9-2 make the lien security for the prior judgments, the prior judgments come in whole — fee awards included:
“[T]he trial court abused its discretion by failing to include the unpaid amounts of those attorney fee awards in the foreclosure judgment.”
On the second, the panel restated a rule of general Indiana practice that trial courts periodically forget when the fee request strikes them as disproportionate to the debt:
“[G]enerally, the reasonableness of the attorney's fees is a matter to be resolved in an evidentiary hearing.”
Reversed and remanded, with instructions to include the earlier unpaid fee and cost awards in the decree and to hold a hearing on the reasonableness of the current fees.
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