well this answer’s not going to be as

interesting or juicy as custody

but issues that i see that are complex

are things like if somebody had a

business and let’s say they had it

before marriage in california because

the business was established before the

marriage the character of the business

is separate property so it belongs to

the person who owned the business before

the marriage

the issue that comes into play in a

divorce is if the if the value of the

business has appreciated so let’s say

the business is worth a hundred thousand

dollars on the date that you get married

and then the value increases to a

million dollars at the time that you

separate the court has to decide

why did the business appreciate

did it appreciate because

of the efforts of the working spouse or

the non-working spouse did they

primarily contribute to the growth or

appreciation in the business or was it

factors like inflation having nothing to

do with a spouse’s efforts

those are extraordinarily

complex issues and going back to what to

recommend to a client

never hire an attorney that has not

tried one of those cases because those

cases are factually intensive

they are legally intensive you have to

be able to pivot on a moment’s notice

whether it’s before you go to trial or

at the time of trial

you have to know a lot about financial

issues and accounting and

things like reasonable compensation so

if you don’t have those kind of cases in

the hands of an experienced attorney it

could be disastrous for you because they

could miss

very nuanced legal issues they could

miss

factual issues they can be ill-prepared

to take a deposition

usually in those cases and i had one

case

that the husband was married previously

and divorced and that case was published

in the court of appeal in california so

i represented the second spouse

and our position was that during the

marriage the

monies he received from the business

were community because it was based upon

his salary versus the profits from the

business in order to prove our point

we had to take numerous depositions of

his partners

and of his competitors and to other

people that worked in his business

and had to take depositions and take

testimony

of

expert witnesses that were business

appraisers and reasonable compensation

experts and tax experts

and that takes a team of very skilled

lawyers to be able to do that and to be

successful in terms of the outcome which

in that case it was