How to Protect Your Assets During a Divorce

High net worth and celebrity divorces and custody matters are looked at differently by the courts one of the reasons why is because judges can craft unique settlements or unique Solutions because of the assets of the parties one thing that judges may decide to do is judges may decide to do a concept called nesting what happens in nesting is when one parent is in the house with the children and the other parents not there so the children live in the house and the parents rotate in and out of the house the reason why this can be done in high asset situations is because both parents can have separate houses and they can nest with the children in the house that the children have always lived in that’s one such strategy that the courts may use if you’re a highet Worth or a high asset person or a celebrity so that children receive the least amount of harm or that children receive the least amount of disruption of their daily lives by staying in their same home in their same rooms and their same similar surroundings If the parents come in and out of the house in the nesting concept then the children still have everything that they’ve grown up accustomed to in the house that they’ve lived for several years that’s one such strategy that we pursue when we’re representing High net worth or high asset or celebrity clients and crafting custody agreements for celebrities or high asset individuals there are several things that have to be taken into consideration one is what does the infrastructure look like surrounding the kids meaning many times High asset people and celebrities have nannies or opers or people who provide care for the children on a regular basis that has to be considered not only payment for the individuals but schedules for the individuals and also whether that individual will go back and forth with the kids when they go from both houses meaning if you have a nanny does that Nanny parent the children for the mother and the father during their separate time or does that Nanny only parent for one these are considerations that must be thought through in crafting custody agreements for children of high net worth individuals or whose parents are celebrities an important factor to consider with many of the divorces that we deal with or custody situation that we deal with is confidentiality because the hope is to not have a public record of the dispute between the parties that the children would be able to see later in life so we work really hard with clients to make sure that there’s confidentiality in the agreements that the parties have decided meaning we can keep financial information confidential we can keep what the arrangements and the address of the part is confidential we can even keep the names of schools and other pertinent information out of public documents which may be associated with children because in every divorce there are going to be a set of documents concerning the custody of the children what we make sure of with celebrities or political officials or high asset individuals is that the information in those documents is kept and treated in such a way that it’s sensitive and private so that it can’t be put in the public which may cause harm to the children one of the things that we do to help high asset or celebrity individuals in divorces to protect their assets is we make sure that we get a full evaluation of how much the assets are worth we then look to determine whether any of those assets should be excluded from the marriage because they were assets before the individuals got married meaning if you have residuals if you’ve been on TV shows if you have stock accounts if you have houses that you had before you got married we would make the argument that that shouldn’t be included in the marit estate because you already had those assets by excluding those assets that can help protect the assets and more of the assets of high ass set individuals or celebrity individuals which come in with resources such as residuals from TV shows movies Etc or records in being able to keep those out of what would be divided in a divorce and so that’s one of the ways in which we try to help another way in which we try to help is we try to see what Financial structures are in place that would allow for the assets to be shielded and working with clients one to one we can come up with some of those asset shelters which can help those assets be separate from the divorce we work with individuals throughout the years to help minimize the division of assets because we work with them through the divorce to make sure that assets were represented correctly to the court there are many strategies that can be used to help keep assets and a sensitive matter such as a divorce or child custody situation from being a public matter we work with our clients to maximize the use of these strategies it is our hope that such a sensitive matter would not have such a record that would be harmful to the children or the family as you going through this difficult time one of the ways in which we help keep sensitive issues confidential is we can petition the court to ask for the record to be sealed many times if there’s information that part don’t want to be public and there’s not an interest in it being public the record can be sealed so we have successfully sealed many divorces and custody matters of high asset or celebrity individuals so that the record will not be public and what does a seal mean a seal means that the file cannot be accessed or that there is no file that the public can have unless they get an order from the judge so normally you could go into the clerk’s office and you could request a file if you’re request a sealed file it will come back that the file is sealed and the only way you can get information from it is to seek a judge’s approval and so we’ve successfully worked with several individuals to have the record sealed so there’s nothing out there that would harm the children or the family unit later in life