1.2Adoption Cases are High Priority

“All proceedings under [the Adoption Code] shall be considered to have the highest priority and shall be advanced on the court docket so as to provide for their earliest practicable disposition. . . . An adjournment or continuation of a proceeding under [the Adoption Code] shall not be granted without a showing of good cause.” MCL 710.25(1)-(2). See also MCL 710.21a(c), which sets out the general purposes of the Adoption Code and includes, among other purposes, providing “prompt legal proceedings to assure that the adoptee is free for adoptive placement at the earliest possible time.”

In parallel adoption and paternity proceedings, “[t]he trial court ha[s] the authority to stay the paternity action in favor of the adoption proceedings: absent good cause, adoption proceedings should be given priority,” and “a trial court has the inherent authority to control the progress of a case.” In re MGR, 504 Mich 852, 853 (2019), rev’g In re MGR, 323 Mich App 279 (2018). In MGR, “[r]espondent-father never requested the court to stay the adoption proceedings under MCL 710.25(2) for good cause relating to his separate paternity proceeding, and the facts did not justify a stay in any event” where he filed a paternity action over one month after a petition for adoption was filed for the minor child, and “[t]he trial court entered an order of filiation . . . after it had issued its [MCL 710.39 (interested putative father)] determination and after petitioners had appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals.” MGR, 504 Mich at 853. “Because petitioners[-adoptive parents] had a right to appeal the [MCL 710.39] determination and because good cause to delay those proceedings had not been alleged, the trial court should have stayed the paternity proceedings pursuant to MCR 7.209(E)(2)(b) so that the appellate court could review th[e MCL 710.39] decision.” MGR, 504 Mich at 853 (vacating the erroneously-entered order of filiation in the related paternity case, Brown v Ross, 504 Mich 871 (2019), and concluding that “the order of filiation did not moot appellate review of the trial court’s . . . [MCL 710.39] decision”).¹ See also In re LMB, 504 Mich 869, 869 (2019) (trial court abused its discretion by denying petitioners-adoptive parents’ motion to stay respondent-father’s related paternity action (filed after the MCL 710.39 hearing in the adoption case was already underway) and by “allowing the case to proceed to entry of an order of filiation while” an appeal on the trial court’s MCL 710.39 hearing “was pending before the Court of Appeals” and where “respondent-father never sought a stay of the adoption proceedings to pursue the paternity action, and no facts justified a stay in any event”).

“Although proceedings under the Adoption Code should, in general, take precedence over proceedings under the Paternity Act, adoption proceedings may be stayed upon a showing of good cause, as determined by the trial court on a case-by-case basis.” In re MKK, 286 Mich App 546, 562-563 (2009) (finding that the respondent-putative father “established good cause for delaying the adoption proceedings in favor of his paternity action[, where t]here was never any genuine dispute that respondent was the child’s biological father, . . . there was no unreasonable delay in respondent’s attempt to establish paternity, . . . [h]e filed his paternity action shortly after the child’s birth and before petitioners filed their adoption petition[, and] . . . there [was] little merit to the argument that he filed his paternity action simply to thwart [the mother’s] adoption plan.”).²