Attorney James Sexton on How to Get Divorced Without Going Broke

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on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Like I had a $20 million divorce negotiation fall apart because of a toaster oven. Wait, James Sexton America's divorce attorney is back. A few weeks ago you heard the first part of our conversation where he gave advice for engaged couples. That episode is linked in the show notes. Do not miss it. And if you have a friend

who's getting married, send them the episode. It might feel weird to send them an episode with a divorce attorney. But honestly he has a really unique POV on staying together that I think everyone should hear. Now today you're going to hear his advice for people thinking about getting

divorced. Everyone says the same thing. I want to be fair. The problem is there's spouses in

another lawyer's office saying I want to be fair and they have totally different definitions

“of what's fair. What you need to know about alimony. You're not going to be successful in”

like preventing alimony in a case where alimony is clearly applicable. The question is how long and how much? And if I front load it, can I have a shorter duration? And how to get divorce without going broke? I'm a thousand dollars an hour. If I believe that there's no domestic violence happening, no course of control and there's a really any chance that it would be successful. I encourage people to go to mediation. I'm Nicole Lappin. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to

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Sofy really puts their money where their mouth is when it comes to their members. Check them out today at sofy.com/mnn as in Money News Network. And you can get up to $1,000 in stock when you open and fund a new active sofy investing out. Which financial habits made during a marriage makes divorce more complicated. Yeah, willful blindness. I think would be the number one thing. Which is, you know, I I'll use a safer metaphor. I love to cook. Love to cook. So if you're in a relationship

with me, I enjoy cooking. Like it's my favorite thing to do on weekends. I make meal prep and I love to like make interesting meals. And I really love to cook. It relaxes me. It's very soothing. If you don't like to cook, great, right? Because if I like to cook and you like to cook, then we're both going to be like, well, who gets to cook tonight. But if you don't like to cook and

“I love to cook and you like my cooking, we are going to have a great time. You should still know how to”

make something for yourself, right? Because like if I'm away for a week, what are you going to do just order door dash every day? Like you, you should know how to do a little bit. Well, it's the same thing with money. Like some people really enjoy personal finance. Yeah, you really enjoy it. Right, but in a relationship. And that's pretty good. I believe everybody has to do exactly the same stuff. I think if one person is like, hey, I really enjoy personal finance. I enjoy making our budget.

I enjoy watching where we're spending. I enjoy making adjustments for portfolio. But we should be checking in with each other. About hey, I know you might not find this super interesting. But here's like a little snapshot of where everything is. And here's where we're making money. And here's where we're losing money. And here's some things I think we should tweak. Because at least, you're, you're a passenger in this thing. Like we have to be participating together in this.

And understand, if God forbid something happened to you. And I don't even know where the money is

“or where our investments are. That's incredibly dangerous. Well, that's what happens. Listen,”

life is challenging. Right? Most people, both people are working in the relationship. There's kids. One person is usually more of a primary caregiver to the children. Most often a woman.

Guys, so the truth is, is women are working and they're managing children within the home. They're

doing the lion's share of the labor. Men are working as well. So everybody's got their hands very full. It's understandable to say, yeah, look, I got the kid's stuff. You got the money stuff. Like, let's just look, let's stay in our lane and they ever get everything done at the end of the day. But it's dangerous. It's dangerous for you to not know your kid's routine and their pediatrician and what's going on with their school and where there are issues. It's dangerous to not know where

the money is and to have some general sense of things. But I have to deal with people's willful blindness all the time when it comes to custody, when it comes to finances, those are very dangerous financial habits because what you don't know can hurt you. And it can be used in a

“variously to hide much worse. Oh, I have people who come into my office all the time that their”

spouse has no idea that they are planning to divorce them and we're doing what I would call divorce planning, which is we're starting to like deplete marital assets and use them to pay certain expenses and we're trying to like accumulate debt that we can then make marital debt like we're there. If you, if you have the information listen to me, explain that more. So how what's the most common way people hide money before family to for family members? I mean, there's lots of ways

like gradually you can take small amounts of cash out that you could then say like, oh, I was using that for various cash expenses. We have, but meanwhile, you're just accumulating a pile of cash someplace. You can transfer certain things to family members if you do it, you know, if you do it in a calculated way. I mean, it's harder and harder. Like 25 years ago when I started doing this was before, you know, it was before the Patriot Act and it was before there was such careful

reporting of movement of money. And it was really before everything was so digital as it is. Now, it's very hard to move money around and not trace it. Although a hard wallet in crypto has presented unique challenges and divorce law. But even then, most people who use crypto often do it through a third party thing like Coinbase or one of those things, which essentially turns it similar to Fiat currency in terms of its traceability. And you're helping people do that.

Well, I'm helping people divorce plans sometimes. Yeah, I'm helping people in advance. Look, if you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck. Like part of the job is to help people if they come to you early enough, figure out how to gain tactical advantage in divorce. So you can legally hide money before you can legally make financial decisions that will ultimately be advantageous to you in the event of a divorce if you know a divorce is coming. You could do that now like you could

start making financial decisions. Like the problem is in a divorce, the squirrel who saved their

nuts gets penalized in a way that the squirrel who ate their nuts doesn't. Like the saver gets banged up in the divorce because you're one person in the eyes of the law. And the absence of a pre-nup title doesn't control anymore. You're one person. So if you spend all your money and the

its his. You buy your spouse a burkin bag, you bought yourself one half of a burkin bag, you buy your

“spouse a Rolex, you bought yourself one half of a Rolex. So you're one person in the eyes of the law.”

So people are making choices about their divorce during their marriage, whether they realize it or not. But if you know you're going to potentially be getting divorced, you can make tactical decisions about that. And a forensic attorney isn't. You're not doing anything. I'm not talking about doing anything fraudulent. I'm talking about making financial choices that, looking back, they were tactically good for you in the divorce and they were tactically bad for your spouse at the

divorce. You're playing the rules of the system as they're designed. Like it's not, it's not anything fraudulent. I mean, are there things people can do fraudulently? Of course, there's tons of things people can do fraudulently. And they do them all the time. Thankfully, good forensic accounting can usually reveal those things. It's very hard to move money around and not leave a trace. But it also depends on like one of the problems, too, is that if you're married to someone who

conducts themselves in very shady financial ways, you can't turn around later and go, man, I can't believe how hard it is to prove the income in this divorce. It's like, buddy, you've had, you've been married to someone who has a cash business who declare $70,000 in

income while you guys are living a million dollar a year lifestyle. And now you're turning around

saying, man, you've been enjoying the fact that none of your income has been taxable for this entire time. You know, yeah, like, how do you prove that the vault in your house? I once had a client who they had a jacuzzi in their backyard. And they had filled tennis ball cans with rolled up $100 bills in the lining of the jacuzzi. And so they had literally over the years, like, filled this lining of the jacuzzi with these tennis ball cans filled with rolled up $100 bills.

And I actually had to, I actually had to have an expert come in and testify to how many hundred dollar bills that would be that you could fit in the tennis cans and then how many tennis cans you could fit around it. But it's hard to prove the movement of cash, otherwise, if cash stays cash, it's hard to prove where cash went. There was $100 on that table and now it's gone. How do you prove it was over there? So what are some red flags that people should be aware of with

“money moves that their significant other is making that could signal their planning for a divorce?”

Yeah, I mean, the the problem is this. Some, and again, it's a difference between ultra high net worth

and non ultra high net worth. So in this space that a lot of my clients currently occupy, there are a lot of wealth preservation and tax avoidance strategies that people employ using trust in the states and tax attorneys for very legitimate and legal reasons that make a divorce extremely messy because as you know, very wealthy people don't own a lot. So that way they don't pay taxes on it. So they have an interest in a trust that owns an LLC that owns the real estate

that they rent from that trust in an intentionally defective grant or trust. So that's a thing people do for real legitimate tax planning and wealth preservation reasons. But if you're getting divorced, it's super messy because neither of you own it. So now the question is is who gets more benefit from it, one or the other? How do we deal with something that's no longer in the marital estate? So that that's a level of complexity that really requires a very deep and personal dive into someone's finances

for the general population for like most normal people, making you know, W2 wage earners or people

to make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year a piece or even a couple of million.

Large transfers of funds into trusts, purchasing big and newities instead of having large sums of money, leveraging real estate, like taking out huge encompasses against a marital residence, like a home equity line of credit or taking a big mortgage against one residence to purchase another one, but then titling that residence in the name of other family members or third parties or a trust or an LLC. Like anytime someone makes a financial move that's different than

the normal status quo, it's worth going, oh, why are we doing that? Like help me understand why we're doing that. And then the question is, is there plausible deniability? Is there some plausible alternate theories to why this thing was done? That's very innocuous. What in fact it was very nefarious? Well, somebody is thinking about getting divorced. What are some practical things they should do in advance? They should identify where assets are. They should try to get copies of

“all of their important financial paperwork. They should make sure that they have access to some”

funds if possible without the permission of the other party, whether it's a credit card in their soul name or whether it's family or whether it's an account in their names that they have access to hiring counsel, even if they need the counsel to then make an application for further counsel fees. I mean, I think they're all just basic financial decisions that anyone should make in any situation that

mind? Like for a lawyer, friends like accounting? It could be tricky. You know, people, the two

“most reasonable questions anybody can ask me at a consultation is how long is this going to take”

and how much is it going to cost? And I always tell them those were two questions no honest lawyer can answer.

Because divorce is like a table for Lexer's you and your lawyer and your spouse and their lawyer. If one leg is off, it doesn't matter how nice and straight the other three legs are, the table's going to fall down. Like, and then the next question people say is they go, well, give me a range. You know, like what's the range? Like an easy divorce expense versus a really difficult divorce expense. And I would say to people, it's kind of like calling your friend

who's a doctor and saying, I have a headache. What is it? And they'll say, well, it could be anything I have to run tests and I have to know more information. They say, well, best case worst case. All right, best case is the barometric pressure and you'll be fine in 10 minutes. Worst case is an aneurysm. You'll be dead in 10 minutes. Like, did I help you by saying that

gigantic of a range? Like simple divorce, five grand, 10 grand. If everybody's in agreement,

we're writing up a stipulation of settlement. Everyone signs off on it and we follow the settlement contest to divorce. High end expensive divorce, two million in council fees, three million. Like it depends on how complex the marital estate is. Two W2 wage earners. If they have custody issues and visitation issues and they litigate the issues of custody can be hundreds of thousands of dollars easily. Easily. Like, I've had cases involving billionaires that was like $20,000 in

council fees total. And I've had cases with W2 wage earners who make, you know, less than 100 grand apiece each. And it's cost a million dollars in council fees. Thank God they had family members that were willing to like leverage all of their savings for their custody case. But you know, it really is not, you know, there is no issue in a divorce that two people sitting at the kitchen

table with a yellow pad and a pen can't resolve. But the problem is that that's not it? Like,

no one comes 25 years of practicing matrimony alone. No one has ever come into my office for a council sat in front of me and said, I would like this to be very protracted and awful. I would like it to scar me and my children. I would like to put your children through college instead of my own. I would like this to be just the most miserable experience of my life. Everyone says the same thing. I want to be fair. The problem is their spouses in another

lawyer's office saying, I want to be fair and they have totally different definitions of what's fair. And that's where the challenge is. But I tell every single client in the initial consultation as does every reputable attorney, Laura, John tightler, Bob Cohen, all the good ones. We all told him the same thing behind closed doors. Listen, negotiating table court room. I'm a monster. I'll go after everybody. Behind closed doors, I'd rather you pay her than pay me.

I'd rather you pay him than pay me. I'd rather you put your kids through college than mine. Like, there is, there's going to be a wedding. You know, like you got a five-year-old, there's going to be a wedding. You can't even imagine it right now because you kids five. But there's going to be a wedding. And what you do in this process is going to dictate. If that's the wedding where you guys can't pass each other by the shrimp boat or you'll throw

shit at each other. Or if it's the wedding where the wedding I just had, where you all stand around

“for pictures together. And you have a drink and you have a dance and you go, you know what?”

We didn't get the marriage right, but man, we did a good job with these kids. Like, and you celebrate as a family. Like, to me, that should be the goal. That should be the goal. Like, from day one, that should be the goal. Like, if the marriage is ending, sometimes happily ever after, is happily ever after separately. And that's okay. Like, relationships can just be chapters in a long book. You know, it doesn't have to be that, oh, well, this one ended, so it was a failure.

I don't consider my marriage a failure. It wasn't a failure. It produced two wonderful children who are now wonderful adults. And it made me a better man. I hope it made her a better woman. Like, I think we got real value out of that thing. Just because something ends doesn't mean it was, by the way, every marriage ends, your marriage will end. I hope your marriage ends in death. What a weird thing to say, right? But it does. It's going to end in death or divorce. I hope

it ends in death. But it will end. Everything ends. It's ending right now. It's ending all the time. That that's not only does that not make it beautiful. That's part of what makes it so beautiful. Is that it's there. Like, you don't need anything. You don't need permission to take it seriously. You don't need permission to write now. Like, if if you got a phone call, God forbid that something happened to your husband, you would suddenly drop everything else in your life. The

volume would be turned down on everything else in your life other than that. You don't need that phone call for that to happen. You can just do that. You can just stop and do that and just say,

“this is important to me. You don't need any flare to be sent up for that to be a real thing.”

And that's the message I'm trying to drive home to people is that we can use divorce and the reality of it as an invitation to take love very seriously. And do you recommend people

what are your billable hours now? I'm a thousand dollars an hour. Yeah. I think that, yeah, I always

if I believe that there's no domestic violence happening, no course of control. And there's a really any chance that it would be successful. I encourage people to go to mediation. Because mediation is, you know, it's everything that's set in mediation is not admissible in a court of law. At best, you'll resolve your difficulties in mediation. And then before you sign anything, it'll be reviewed by council. At worst, you're going to at least get a sense of what the other

side's perspective is on the issues. And you'll start having some understanding of where you guys might have some points of disagreement. And then you can come to council and we can, like, people have this mistake and belief that it's either we go to the mediator, we sync whom by

on, we sign everything. And it's easy. Or it's knocked down drag out where the roses kill it.

Like, those are the two extremes. And thank God, most of the time, it's, it's not this extreme. Unfortunately, it's rarely this extreme. It's usually a negotiation between two people in their lawyers who occasionally are going to need a judge to come in and break a tie. We're reasonable minds disagree. Where two lawyers are advocating for something because there's things that are black and white and a law. And then there's some gray areas. So everybody's

going to argue the gray area in favor of their client. That's our job. So sometimes the judge, the person, the black rob who gets to make the decision that listen to your arguments and they'll go, yeah, more like that and less like that. And then you go, okay. And then you go out and you

“settle your case. And that's how most divorces go. Like, I've had case, I had a case right”

last month with John Tyler, he is, in my opinion, the greatest divorce lawyer in the United States, definitely in the state of New York. He's also one of my main courtroom adversaries. And we had a huge case with billions of dollars on the line. And we settled it in three phone calls and two emails. And probably like 10 grand worth accounts fees 20 grand with accounts fees.

Because we both knew like, all right, here's what you're going to do. Here's what I'm going to do.

Like, here's what it's going to be. And we've had some brawl. It's not that either of us doesn't like to fight. We're both courtroom lawyers. We have good teams. We're like, you know, like, like, you know, Ali and Frazier. But the truth is, like, we're also not going to waste anybody's time. We're not going to waste each other's time. I'm not going to waste our clients money. So we're going to make good choices by saying, okay, look, let's just get there. This is where

“the judge is going to go. This is let's just get there now. And that's what you do.”

Well, yes, if my marriage will end in death as crazy as that sounds. If somebody isn't, what's the best way to ask for a divorce? Gosh, I still can give you better answer than me. I think I'm a fan of being clear with people. I think being clear and compassionate. So I would say, I would be, I think people have a tendency when they're giving someone bad news to hedge a bit because they think they're softening it. But I think when you're breaking up with someone, there's no way to say that they're

going to feel good about it. So you have to just sort of reject that possibility from minute one and then just be very clear. Because if you say, you know, I've been thinking that maybe we should, okay, you're already screwing this up. Like maybe implies that, but maybe not. Like I think it turns into, I've given this some careful thought and I think this relationship needs to end. Like that's clear. It feels harsh. But what you're losing in terms of the softness,

“you're gaining a lot in terms of clarity. So I think clarity is really important. I would say”

compassionate clarity should be the mantra, which is you're not like take your share of the blame. Don't put it on this person, you know. But also don't try to be so compassionate that you're no longer clear about what it is. I've been thinking maybe we should add some time. No, look, if you've decided this relationship is over, I've come to a place where this relationship no longer makes sense for me. And I feel like we need to end it. Let's talk about Alamani.

Sure. How does I gave up my career for you or for this family to show up in an hour? Yeah. So in every state, spousal support, Alamani maintenance is three words for the same thing. Every state uses a different term. New York, we call it spousal maintenance or spousal support. California calls it Alamani. New Jersey calls it Alamani, but it's the same thing. It's a payment made by a moneyed spouse to a non-moneyed spouse when there's a disparity in incomes.

There are in New York 14 factors in the domestic relations law that govern spousal support or Alamani. One of them is what you just described, which we call that diminished lifetime earning capacity. So diminished lifetime earning capacity is when a person has made decisions by virtue of the marriage that their long term earning capacity has now been impaired. So it's not just a short term thing. It's a longer term thing. The analogy or metaphor I give to

people is if you're running a marathon and in mile 20 you stop for 10 minutes. You could still

So you'll finish, but you're not going to catch up with those people because there's a diminished

capacity, right? Those people have gone further. So the law believes in this concept called detrimental reliance. And in contracts that becomes a very important thing, which is a detriment I relied on a promise you made to my detriment, right? So if I say to you, you can borrow my car tomorrow. I've made you a promise. If you now cancel the car you had and then I turn around and I say, oh, I'm sorry, you can't use my car now. Okay, you've now detrimentally relied on my

promise. So now I've created damages to you. So that's essentially what Alamani has designed one of the factors that Alamani is designed to address is detrimental reliance, meaning in reliance on you being the primary wage owner and us staying together, I made certain choices, financially,

about my career, my profession, what I was going to be doing. And I've diminished my lifetime

earning capacity. So if, for example, as many people do, when you have children in your 30s or 40s, there's going to be a chunk of time, even if it's just when the kids are before school age, where you might not be working as much, right? You're going to be out of the workforce for a period of time. That's going to diminish your lifetime earning capacity, because the people that didn't step out of the race for that nine months or year or three years or five years, they're getting a

head start. So the people you went to business school with, they're going to have a little bit of a

“head start. So that's what you're arguing when you're arguing spousal maintenance. And sometimes”

there's a lot of other factors like future inheritance is that people might be getting what their

ability to earn is. Because the idea of what we call non-derational alumony or what you

just be called lifetime alumony, it really fell out of vote quite some time ago. Now it's the idea is really what's called rehabilitative, which is essentially to get a person back to where they would have been or as close as possible. So the idea, for example, is if a person was an attorney and then they, you know, marry someone who's very, you know, wealthy and they say, okay, I'm going to step off of partner track and I'm going to be home with kids that we had or adopt during the marriage.

That's, you're going to step back a bit and you're going to be behind other people. So you still have a law license, you still can get a job. But now, you know, maybe you need a few extra years because the kids are school age or you don't have, you know, or you've lost some opportunities

“when it came to the kind of placement you would have, that's what alumony is designed to do.”

Is to sort of diminish the negative impacts of detrimental reliance that you made in reliance on the promise of the marriage, because what is marriage other than a promise? It's a promise that we're going to walk the path together. Just walking each other home. That's it. Are these conversations different when the woman is the breadwinner? I mean, in my experience, women tend to marry laterally or up more often than men. So a lot of the very high performing women that I

represent are married to men who are equally or higher performing. So like you don't often, it's pretty common to have like the Goldman Sachs bro or the black rock bro marrying a yoga teacher. It's not as common to have like the Goldman Sachs gal or the, you know, Google exec gal marry a broke musician. Seems so cliche, but it's true. Yeah, it's true. Women, women, I think, you know, again, I don't know the gender dynamic of it. Perfectly, you could all speculate probably, but I think that,

you know, women find a man who's a successful person attractive. I don't think that that's a secret.

“And I think men very often like feeling a little more powerful, you know, in terms of the”

finance that they bring your relationship or the success they bring your relationship. I don't think that these are like I'm saying anything too controversial to say that out loud. So you don't deal with Palamoni. Well, Palamoni doesn't really exist in most states now, but I mean what I will say is I've represented a couple of outlier, very successful women who are married to men who are not as successful. So I've had someone who were in finance married to a partner at a law firm and maybe he gets laid off

or maybe he has issues like I had one case where the guy had an opiate addiction that affected his employability and then she ended up having to pay Alamoni to the him even though they had both been quite successful and then his kind of derailing was a function of of his substance use issues. Which again, you know, if you believe in the, you know, like like disease model of addiction, like you wouldn't get mad at someone be like damn it, like you have lupus, like you would say like

you know, damn I'm like you're an alcoholic, like it's an illness, so I get it. And that's the argument that was made. But I will say, and again, this might not be a popular take, women don't like paying Alamoni, like they like it even less than men do from what I've seen. Like every time I tell a woman, yeah, you're going to pay Alamoni, she's like what? Like you do could be the most Bella absug feminist when you get told you're going to be paying

gender as a construct and you know, suddenly they're like he has a strong back, he can get a job, are you kidding me? Like I'm going to pay him Alamoni, like it's a very, when I do like, I actually just do a lot of lesbian divorces now because you know marriage equality, you know, has been the law of land for quite some time and it turns out that gay and lesbian individuals aren't that much better than us heterosexuals at marriage. They find it equally challenging. I don't really know,

you know, we were fighting for marriage equality for so long and I always found myself wondering

“that if you really did hate, you know, gay and lesbian individuals like you should have been fighting”

for them to have to get married, you know, because why should we have all the misery to ourselves? But one of the things that that I found is I actually just had a conversation with a lesbian client, like hearing a woman say like if if that bitch thinks she's going to get half my business and I'm listening to her say that I'm like, wow, that is not on my 26th single card like I did not imagine hearing a woman say that about another woman, but you know, listen, it becomes a very mercenary thing,

it's not gendered. Like it's about the haves and the have not, it's about what we owe each other, you know? So is it more money, more power in these Alehmoni conversations? I mean, certainly, I mean, the person who has the money has something to lose, though, too.

And so what would you tell the other side? I mean, I think what you want to always do is find

the formula and the accommodation that's going to make sense. You're not going to be successful in like preventing Alehmoni in a case where Alehmoni is clearly applicable. The question is, is how long and how much? And if I front load it, can I have a shorter duration? And, you know, the time value of money applies or in lieu of Alehmoni, I'll give you this asset and that applies certain negative contingency discounts? I mean, a lot of what I do isn't sexy. Like people think

divorce lawyers are constantly like just dealing with, you know, crazy custody cases and like cross-examining people. And there's a big part of my job that is that. But a lot of what I do is like, you know, kind of wonky, doorky stuff. Like it's a lot about like, you know, applying negative contingency discounts and figuring out if an asset's in an intentionally defective grant or trust, like what impact does that have in the marital estate? Like it's kind of doorky stuff. But because

“I'm a trial lawyer and as a trial lawyer, you have to have like a performer streak and you have to”

be able to like it's, I call it full context storytelling. Like you're trying to tell a story while someone's actively trying to stop you from telling that story and tell a competing story. So it's like a the hardest kind of storytelling imaginable. You do very well. Well, it's, you know, I just over-talk at everybody. What's the best argument if somebody wants to keep the house? There's a lot of ways to keep the house. I mean, stability for children is a big

successful argument for that, which is if if children are at certain ages, you can use those ages as like guide posts of well, I should be able to stay in the house for an experience of time and try to make the argument that this person doesn't need their equity out of the house right away and that they should let it ride and that you couldn't find comparable accommodations for the children in the same geographic area for a similar price or a lower price. So there's a lot of

factors you can argue. The buyout on the residents, as I was coming in, I was like sitting in a coffee

“shop nearby and killing some time before I came in to talk to you and because I'd finished in”

court this morning and I just had a little bit of extra time and I want to go all the way up town. And I was on my phone returning emails and one of them was this person just had like a massively false appraisal of the marital residents. Like this house is worth like 800 grand and

they got an appraisal for 1.5 million. And so I wrote back and say great, she can buy us out at that

price and no problem. And of course instantly now, he's like, wow, you know, that might not be the right place. I'm like, no, second ago when we were buying you out, that was the right price. Like, so there are some internal mechanisms that force people to be a little bit reasonable because they're careful with the appraisal. Well, yeah, you want to do it in a thoughtful way because you don't want to walk into dueling experts. Like you get an irrationally high appraisal like at an irrationally

low appraisal and then we have a false average between the two. It's better to come up with like a neutral trusted. This is one of the things that like good divorce lawyers. We have networks of trust where the accountants, trust where the appraisers, like jewelry appraisers, art appraisers, bag appraisers, wine collection appraisers, all the car appraisers, all the things that people have, we have like the people that you know are neutral. Because the danger of the court system

is, you know, there was a time in the 1980s and 1970s where the cigarette companies were getting sued and they found doctors who would testify that cigarettes are good for you. Because if you pay an expert enough money, you can get them to say almost anything. So you don't want to get into dueling experts. What you want to do is you want to come up with neutral, fair people that are qualified and know what they're doing and give you accurate values

and good experienced lawyers. We all know who the good ones are and who the hack jobs are. Right, one of the sexiest divorces out there is bunny exo in jelly roll. Where are they?

So just for clarity. So jelly roll is a musician. Bunny is a prodcaster.

“Bunny has talked about how she worked as an escort to support him. If we, that's a very, very specific”

case, but for entrepreneurs, athletes, if one person is supporting the other in the beginning of their release, if they're in the beginning of their relationship for the beginning of their career, what are they entitled to? Well, it's one of the factors a court considers when they're talking about things like Alimone. It's also one of the factors in what's called equitable distribution, which is the division of assets and the division of property. And some jurisdictions

after a certain period of time like California, you have things like community property where after a certain period of time, all property is marital property. And there's no distinction between separate property and marital property, like pre marital property and marital property. In New York, we are still a state that has separate property and marital property. So if you keep your separate property separate, the appreciation on it will remain separate property potentially in a divorce.

So in a case like that, you know, courts look at that. Like courts in in divorces are what's called equitable courts. Like there's courts of equity and then there's courts of like strict application of law. So like a judge in criminal court can't give you a life sentence for a parking ticket. That would be an abuse of their discretion. There are sentencing guidelines. They can give you this little or this much and that's it. The legislature has spoken

courts of divorce are courts of equity. So it's about fairness. So courts look at factors.

“And that's why I say like my job is full context storytelling. I can tell that story”

in a way that makes one side look very sympathetic. And I can tell it in a way that makes the other side look more sympathetic. Like that's that's the thing. Facts all come with points of view. So the job of a good trial divorce lawyer is to tell the story in a way that makes my client look most sympathetic and the other side look least sympathetic. So I could represent either of those people in a way that would be more likely to shine in a positive direction for them. Now again,

good divorce lawyers don't try to fit their client with halos and the other side with horns. That's rarely an effective strategy. The better thing to do is to show that they're both human and they're both flawed. But you know, the best salesman isn't doesn't seem like they're trying to sell you anything. The best advertising doesn't seem like an ad. Like the best advocacy doesn't feel like advocacy. I'm just shining a light on the truth. But in reality it's advocacy.

Your version of the truth. Well, my client's version of the truth. The version of the truth that's most favorable to the outcome my client would like to achieve.

“Are you ready for a lightning round? Sure. What's your favorite legalese term?”

Oh, boy, my favorite legalese term. Here are two foreheads here. Prior discussions here, two foreheads here and there's so much good old English. I also like the interpretive and obstreparous. What do those mean? The interpretive is like unduly hostile and obstreparous is being like obstructionists. Like you're standing in the way unnecessarily in creating. So like your client's interpretive, you know, conduct or your client's obstreparous conduct. I feel like we have

to bring those in. Oh, they're fine. Yeah, they're fine. I write a lot of like diagnostic lawyer letters. So you do a lot of like, you know, here to four. Here to four had here and all preceding here to four had here and without prejudice, all names and defenses. The most surprising secret that you uncovered in divorce proceedings. Gosh, I've seen a lot of stuff. There's a chapter in my book called Everyone's Fucking The Nanny that's about a bunch of people that were having affairs

with nannies. And so that's happened a lot. I don't know what it is about nannies. I have a theory

of it. I talk about it in the book, but um, so nanny stuff is always very salacious. That's always

shocking. People sleeping with each other's other family members. That's always, that always catches me off guard. Um, I just feel like there's so many people in the world you could potentially sleep with. Why would you sleep with your sister in law? Like it just feels, it's already like adding insult to injury, you know, and making future things get me even more awkward, you know. It's the most expensive mistake in a divorce. We're getting married.

Now, the most expensive mistake in a divorce, hiring the wrong lawyer, hiring the wrong lawyer. People, people make the following mistake. They hire. It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it. It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener

in a war. So people hire like a friendly, I never try cases. I'm very settlement minded.

Lawyer, because they think that's going to protect them from having an ugly divorce. And that's like someone saying, I've got a gun, but it doesn't have any bullets. Okay, then you don't have a gun. What do you know, throw it at me? Like it's better to have a trial lawyer and not need it than to need a trial lawyer and not have it. So hiring a friendly, warm hug of a lawyer instead of someone

and a very calming force. And some people will say, I'm the sociopath you one on your side and

a unshamed pitball. I'm both of those things, depending on what the situation dictates.

“What is a divorce lawyer know about love that a therapist might not say out loud?”

How the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves. I think people try to tell their therapist the truth, but they're usually telling them lies that they've told themselves. I think one of the things you get to see as a lawyer is people have to tell you the truth, because you have one job and it's to protect them. What's something you've seen ruin of divorce negotiation in five minutes? Personalizing things and

vilifying someone, whether it's the lawyer or whether it's the other party, taking it very personally and losing the plot on what's actually important. Like I had a $20 million divorce negotiation fall apart because of the toaster oven. What? Yeah, yeah. We had everything done. We were done to personal property. We were like, let's not do this. We've got all these other deal points done and they said, no, let's just knock it out. Let's get it finished while we're here.

And we got down to a breville toaster oven. And it blew up into why bought you. Well, I bought

that for you. Well, you bought you never use it and turn into a whole thing. And I actually like

took out my phone and went on Amazon and I said, I can order four of these and they'll be delivered tomorrow prime. And it's going to cost less than 20 minutes of my time. Like what are we doing right now gang? Like this is let's everybody just take a breath. You know, and thankfully it snapped everybody, I did actually order the toaster ovens too. One for each of the lawyers and yeah, one for myself, one for posing council and one for each of the parties. What's the most expensive emotion

into force? Impulsiveness. What's one thing people should never put in writing? The number of people

“they slept with before they were married. What's one thing they should always put in writing?”

They're favorite things about the person they're married to. Like they're top five favorite things.

Like when you when you go to your hotel tonight or wherever it is, you're going to go if you're

not with your husband. Write 10 things that you love about him. 10 things that he does that make you feel loved. Like it will take five minutes and it would be, it will actually make you feel more love. And when he sees it, it'll make him feel more love and it doesn't cost anything. You are so romantic. Well, but I imagine that people's digital footprints now in divorce can turn things in both ways, right? How have you seen that play out? I mean, it's super fun

because now it's like just all out there. Like we get everybody's text messages, things get intercepted all the time. I joke that we all divorce layers. Oh, Steve Jobs, a tremendous debt of gratitude because having the integration and Apple devices where I message comes up on like your iPad that your kid is playing on and suddenly in real time your text message conversation with your with your paramour. Like your the kids like mommy, what happened to my iPad? And then all of a sudden

they're like dads up in the bathroom texting with his mistress and the messages are going, you know, on the thing and you're looking at it, it's caused more chaos. I mean, people's talk about they're not drinking and then it's like, oh, well, what about these pictures from you on Instagram? What about this person's story? TikTok? I had a case recently or was TikTok like we we blew somebody's whole life up with their TikTok. It's guys like giving away money to like

women mostly in Brazil. Like on TikTok, he was giving lions and universes. Like you didn't gift certain amounts of money. TikTok makes lots of money on this by dance is brilliant. They charge you like $1,000 and then you can give $700 to a person. Like each of these toys or whatever, like the unicorns and universes and lions and tigers and bears. And this guy had burned like $300,000 in America last sets that way. How often is this stuff showing up in divorce proceedings? Like

DMs, Venmo transitions. Constantly almost every case now. Yeah, all the time. Because if somebody's crying poor, they're out spending. Yeah, Venmo's Zell, PayPal, all of them cryptocurrency. Like we're we have to we have to be on the edge of all of these technologies and understand them really, really well to our job well. So if somebody's going through a divorce, how should they think

“about what they post on social media? I tell everybody you should treat social media the way that my”

mother used to tell me you should treat things you write, put in writing. Don't put anything in writing you wouldn't want to put up on time square. Or it's Wall Street Journal. Yeah, just don't just don't like beep beep, assume people are recording every conversation you're participating in. Assume that every document, every text message, everything you send will be shown to everyone. Like I think that's good advice in general, by the way. Like I think that don't behave

outside the presence of your partner in a manner you would behave if they were there. You know, like you should behave away from your partner, the way you would behave if your partner was there.

looking. Very true, but don't go back and delete things. No, definitely need to do that. That's

“spoilation of evidence. It's still there. We're going to find it and we're going to make you look”

really bad for having tried to delete it. Yeah. Are you going to even pick up additional charges because spoilation of evidence once there's been what's called a preservation notice sent, which is one of the first things we send in every divorce proceeding. Now you're destroying evidence. So in most jurisdictions, that's a felony. Is there any damages that can be claimed if the other person is just an asshole? Well, not officially, but I most divorce lawyers referred

behind closed doors what we call the asshole tax, which is if the judge perceives your clients an asshole, they're going to make him pay the asshole tax. So the judges have discretion on certain issues, like a range of potential outcomes. And if they decide they don't like your client, they're going to hammer your client where they can hammer them. They're going to make him pay the asshole tax. And I've had a number of cases where I got the other side to have paid the asshole

“tax. And I've had some cases where my client has paid the asshole tax. What's the biggest asshole”

tax paid? And why? A couple of million bucks. For doing what? Just for being rude and abrupt on the

stand arguing with opposing counsel during cross-examination, just coming off like a dick. Like just vibes. Like it's just like, yeah, this person's just like kind of a dick, you know? Like so many people when they're nervous, you know, they don't come off like the way they are. And so they could be a really nice person and like they did a hundred things right. But I had to do one thing wrong. Like no one ever says like think about all the people Jeffrey Dommer didn't eat.

Like they're very caught up in like the ones that he did. But like most people he met, he didn't eat. Like in fairness. Like the majority overwhelming majority of people he met, he did not eat. Now that's not an effective defense as a lawyer, right? You can't go in to be like your runner. Sure, he ate five people. But like he met those people. That's not even one percent of the people that he met that he ate. Come on, it's not that many. Like that's not a good argument.

But if you've told a story 50 times and you've done everything right in the divorce

proceeding, but you lose it on the witness stand at the critical moment, Judge is just going to be

like, yeah, you're an asshole. And then they're going to be able to hit you. I'm actually quite glad that the asshole tax exist. Me too. Me too. Yeah, I weaponized it all the time and I try to mitigate against it from my clients as best I can. But sometimes, you know, if you can't teach a dog how to drive, it doesn't mean you're bad teacher. Like you just said about an impossible task. Like there's times where I'm trying to make someone likeable and they're just not likeable.

There's not a likeable person. Laterally being a kind person pays. It pays to be a kind person. It pays to be a kind person. It pays to be charismatic. It pays to be humble. It pays to be look. We've all watched trials on TV. We watched Johnny Depp and Amber heard. You know, we watched what it's like when someone's charming and affordable on the witness stand and when someone's kind of an asshole on the witness stand and it blows up in your face when you're an asshole on the

witness stand. And again, it doesn't matter. Like the facts aren't necessarily people don't buy the steak. They buy the sizzle. So appearances important. James, as you know, since you've listened to our episodes, thank you so much. We end all of them by asking our guests for a final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank. We didn't talk much. We could talk forever. I love the way you are so poetic and your storytelling. You didn't come from money,

“but what is a financial tip that you've learned along the way to grow your wealth?”

You know, I, I, I was thinking about this before I came in. And my joking answer, based on past relationships would be is if you're ever dating anyone and they decide they want to take up a questery and is a hobby, encourage them to take up cocaine instead because of your chaper. That's my joking answer, but a truthful and based on life experience. I actually think the the best advice I wish I'd learned earlier in life that I think is really useful

is don't buy things you don't need with money. You don't have to impress people. You don't like. I think that right now we do a lot of that. We buy things we don't need with money. We don't actually have mostly to impress people. We don't actually like. And I think that consumption

will never fill the void inside of us. I think love fills the void inside of us. And so

use your money as the tool that it's supposed to be which is to make you feel safe and the people you love feel safe and don't try to shove money at problems or consumption of products at problems that aren't going to be solved that way. Bye, money. Bye, money.