Family proceedings

When a marriage or partnership ends, the business is rarely a bystander. The shares may be in one partner’s name although both built the company; the owner may draw a modest salary while the company keeps the real earnings; a spouse may have worked in the business without a contract. A court will decide where the children live, what is paid and how the assets are divided, and it will look at the business to answer each question. Left unprepared, the proceedings can put the company’s accounts, its value and even its control on the table.

Family proceedings follow a procedure of their own, and what a court decides early on, often provisionally and often in a hurry, tends to set the terms of the final outcome:

• the rules on which court hears the case, and which law applies when the family has lived across borders;
• the rules on urgent and interim measures — the family home, provisional maintenance and the freezing of assets while the case is pending;
• the rules on divorce by mutual consent and contested divorce, and on moving from one to the other;
• the rules on where the children live, how contact with the other parent is arranged, and how a child’s own views are heard;
• the rules on establishing a spouse’s or parent’s real income when it passes through a company, and on the documents a court may order to be produced;
• the rules on whether a business, or shares in one, must be taken into account in the division, and on how it is valued for that purpose;
• the rules on the claims of a spouse who worked in the other’s business without being paid for it;
• the rules on family mediation, and on the agreements a court will approve and make binding;
• the rules on varying or enforcing an order when circumstances change or payments stop.

Our lawyers can support you with this.