Blog Posts: Family Law

You are employed at Intel.  They decide to move the R&D facility to Utah and unless you move with your team, you are out of a job. However, your former spouse has a stable job in Tempe and has parenting time with the children one-half of the time and most certainly has no desire to give up his or her parenting time.  It is lose-lose situations like t...

In recent years it has become more common for divorcing spouses to agree to jointly engage one expert to value the marital interest in a business or professional practice.  While choosing one expert is not suitable for all situations, the potential benefits of using one expert include saving time in the process, reducing the cost of the valuation and increasi...

As far as the outcome is concerned, it should make no difference which party chooses to file the petition for divorce.  However, one of the parties is able to control the process, the person filing (known as the Petitioner) is ultimately able to control the initial portion of their dissolution case. Advantages of Being the Petitioner Firstly, at any proceedin...

In the State of Arizona, any and all property is presumed to be community property. However, property is characterized at the time of its acquisition and therefore, if you owned property prior to your marriage, it is and remains your separate property – unless you gifted same to your spouse, entered an agreement to transfer same to your spouse, or commi...

Requests for Admission are written statements of fact which are submitted to an adverse party in a divorce proceeding which that party is required to admit or deny. They can be an effective and efficient way to establish facts and limit the amount of unresolved issues for trial. Any party to a divorce action has the right to serve on a written Request for Admissio...

Arizona is a community property state which means all property acquired by either spouse during the marriage is, by statute, presumed to be community property. The characterization of property as either sole and separate property or community property is established at the time the property is acquired. Accordingly, in divorces when one of the spouses is the owner...

The amount of time it takes for a divorce to be finalized is different in everyone's case and is driven by a variety of factors.  One of the most important factors is whether other professionals need to be brought into the case such as custody evaluators or business appraisers. This will take more time, as they play an important role in helping to provide inf...

Whenever a privately held business is among the assets in a dissolution proceeding, certain fundamental issues must be addressed in the context of determining the value of the business. [1]If the business is relatively small in terms of the gross revenue it generates, the first issue is often whether the business is worth valuing. The cost of having a qualified pr...

In Arizona, it is not uncommon for a spouse in a dissolution proceeding to assert a "waste" claim against the other spouse.  The term "waste" does not appear in the Arizona statutes that define community property or relate to the dissolution of marriage.  The concept generally derives from the fact that both spouses in a marriage have a fiduciary relatio...

A prenuptial agreement is a binding legal document between a prospective husband and wife, which addresses the financial consequences of their marriage ending. Technically, all couples who are married already have a "prenuptial agreement" - it is the particular divorce laws of the state. In Arizona, for example, absent a prenuptial agreement, community property pri...