You Can Never Proofread a Prenuptial Agreement Too Carefully

For most students, sentence diagramming represents the utmost drudgery; it is the least fun part of school, even worse than long division.  Future lawyers, by contrast, get a kick out of seeing prepositional phrases dangling from the main clause with acrobatic agility and subordinate clauses clinging tenuously to each other like atoms in a covalent bond.  In middle school English class, the fun is just in seeing the structure of the sentence; the wonders of language are a match for the wonders of nature.  In law school, though, the fun comes from exploring the various possible interpretations of every explicit and implicit ligature in the sentence.  In other words, a lawyer is qualified to interpret a prenuptial agreement in ways that no one else is.  Drafting your own prenuptial agreement from scratch or filling one out from a downloadable template may be the more economical choice, but if you get divorced and the judge must interpret the prenup, he or she may come up with interpretations that neither you nor your ex had intended, due to your lack of obsession with linguistic details.  For help finding out what your prenuptial agreement means, or what it could conceivably mean, before you sign it, contact a Boca Raton prenuptial and postnuptial agreement lawyer.

An Indefinite Article Makes a Big Difference

A Florida couple signed a prenup, had a turbulent marriage, and eventually got divorced.  This happens all the time.  The prenup indicated that the wife was entitled to lump sum alimony, and the amounts varied according to the number of years of marriage the couple had completed before one spouse filed for divorce.  This is also a common scenario.  The trouble was that the lump sum alimony amount was based on the duration of the marriage as of the time that “a divorce petition is filed,” and in this couple’s case, there was more than one divorce petition.

The couple married in 2006, and the wife filed for divorce in 2013, after seven years of marriage.  She voluntarily dismissed the divorce petition before the court served the husband with divorce papers, and the marriage continued.  In 2016, the wife filed for divorce again, after ten years of marriage, and this time the divorce went through.  The parties disagreed, however, about the lump sum alimony amount.  Should the court award alimony based on the 2013 divorce filing, in which case the wife would get $2.7 million, or the 2016 divorce filing, in which case she would get $4.2 million?  The couple and their lawyers spent the next four years arguing about the meaning of the word “a,” and the appeals court eventually decided to base the alimony amount on the 2013 divorce filing date.

Contact Schwartz | White About Prenuptial Agreements

A South Florida family law attorney can help you read your prenuptial agreement carefully and amend it to remove all ambiguities regarding its interpretation.  Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.

Source:

scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15194553184336763324&q=divorce+game&hl=en&as_sdt=4,10&as_ylo=2014&as_yhi=2024