Property Settlements
Family property settlements shouldn't be as hard as they so often are. They comprise a mixture of entitlements and needs that can be part realistic, part sentimental, part aspirational and part negotiation.
The balance struck between these factors determines the nature of the settlement process - will it be adversarial or collaborative? Will the parties collaborate to make value (ie: work together to maximise the overall value and use of their assets) or will they compete to claim value (ie: each try to get more than the other out of the pot).
Sometimes it's the sheer cost of fighting the battle - usually with one party have far better information, resources and access to experts than the other - sometimes it's the collateral damage suffered by the family, where children see their parents fighting over things in such a way that they see the whole basis of their emotional universe crumble at the very time they feel themselves relegated to the bottom of the pile.
In either case (and they are often mixed together) there are no real winners amongst reasonable, feeling people (with the probable exception of their advisers) as material victory usually means irrevocable damage to family relations plus deep emotional scarring.
Our Approach
We approach property settlements as problems to be solved. We facilitate establishing what each parties' reasonable needs are (which may involve some serious reality checking) and what assets are, realistically, available for distribution. We then help prepare each party for negotiations based on their reasonable needs and the practicalities of the specific situation.
The result is usually a much faster, cheaper and more acceptable process, where agreements are reached in days, instead of years, and where both parties come out with dignity and with a measure of satisfaction as to the fairness of the outcome that enables them to achieve quicker emotional closure on their overall situation.
When parties are unable, or are congenitally unwilling to reach an agreement, there are other issues at play. We can either go "soft" and take more time preparing tem for negotiations, or we can go "hard" and set up a process where each party gives their arguments their best shot - we then make a binding determination - so they've had their "day in court" (usually an arbitration) and then somebody else (the expert or arbitrator) makes the decision for them.
There are a number of variations on these two main processes - hybrids and multi-level processes, that can also be invoked if the parties so wish.
There are no settlements too large and complex, nor many that are simply too small to obtain serious benefits from processes that are precisely tailored to parties' needs.
