Running a business can be stressful. If your business partner is your spouse, it can get even more challenging. A husband and wife team, Dave and Kathy, ran an event planning company I worked for soon after graduating from college. I always admired them for not only running their business well, but for maintaining a [...]
Savvy business owners include plans for what happens if a partner dies or wants to leave the partnership in their business formation documents. Married couples in business together are wise to make the same plans. There are three critical terms that married couples should consider including as provisions in their business formation documents. 1) A [...]
Guest Blog by Michelle Topal, MSW, LCSW The Impact on Children Separation and divorce is a difficult, painful process for everyone involved. It usually precipitates significant change and loss, and triggers in most people deep feelings of failure, lack of control, rejection and abandonment. Many things have been written about the impact the change to the [...]
It may seem unromantic to plan for the worst, but, like most unromantic things, it’s extremely practical. Forming a business with a spouse can be an incredible, invigorating experience; but it can also be stressful, fraying, and destructive to any relationship. It’s good to know all that going into it, and know that your business [...]
Thanks to increased longevity and better health, more seniors are able to enjoy second marriages. Despite this trend, the North Carolina legislature recently changed the law so that the right a spouse has to choose to take a portion of their deceased spouse’s estate instead of what they would receive under a will no longer [...]
An attorney friend of ours was recently engaged to be married. She’s had a thriving law practice for years, and she thought it would be prudent to have a prenuptial agreement to protect her law firm just in case there was ever marital discord in the future. Her husband-to-be had no problem with her keeping [...]
You’ve heard of collaborative divorce. It sounds like it has significant benefits. But you’re not quite sure what “collaborative divorce" is. What makes it different from a “typical” divorce? In simplest terms, a collaborative divorce means your attorneys, and any other professionals involved in the process, are going to collaborate to help you minimize the [...]
Guest blog by Cora Hietpas, LMFT The dreaded “D” word. Many couples that come to see me have threatened, considered, or seriously discussed getting a divorce with their spouse. This makes perfect sense since the divorce rate continues to hover around 40-50%. I've witnessed divorces that are devastating, time consuming, and downright messy. On the [...]
We know it can be difficult to talk to a spouse about divorce in general, but add in the task of trying to interest them in learning about collaborative divorce, and it probably feels like climbing Mt. Everest. So we put together the following steps and hope they can be helpful. Admit you are scared about what the [...]
I recently heard someone use the term "amicable divorce" when they described collaborative divorce. I've never used that term to describe collaborative divorce, and it got me wondering why. It seems like "amicable divorce" is maybe a quick and easy way to explain what I do. "I help people have an amicable divorce." But that's [...]
We had a call the other day from someone facing divorce. He wanted to know more about the collaborative divorce process. He said he was intrigued by the possibility of a collaborative divorce, but he also wanted to be protected in the divorce. He said he was thinking he might need to call the law firm that [...]
Can counseling hurt you during a divorce? The answer is a resounding yes, if the divorce goes through the traditional process of court litigation. The answer is a resounding no, if the alternative—collaborative divorce—is chosen. We see a lot of people who are in tremendous emotional distress. They are wondering if their marriage is headed [...]
In North Carolina, you can't get divorced until you've been physically separated for at least a year. During the separation period there's a need for two homes while you're still married. If you rent an apartment as the second home, then it can be relatively simple. But if you want to buy a second home [...]
There's no right answer when it comes to whether to sell the house because of divorce. Some say you don’t want to be "stuck" with the home, because it means you'll get fewer of the other marital assets, and these assets may be more liquid, may have fewer costs associated with them, and may appreciate [...]
There's a common myth about collaborative divorce that says it's only for low-conflict couples. In part, this misunderstanding comes from a decision, 25 years ago, to call this intensive, settlement-only effort "collaborative law." It makes it sound like it's "friendly" divorce. But collaborative divorce does not require that spouses feel "friendly" toward each other. Few [...]
The North Carolina Court of Appeals recently handed down an opinion reviewing a child custody case from Wake County that highlights the horror of parenting disputes in court. First, the horror of the cost. The Court of Appeals noted that the trial court did not appoint a parenting coordinator because the parents could not afford [...]
An idea began shaping in Stu Webb's family law office in Minnesota in 1992. The novel idea was to help families through the divorce process with a new approach he decided to call collaborative law. This month, Collaborative Law Proceedings were officially accepted as a practice area in New Jersey, which is the 10th state [...]
This four-part blog series will explain 4 unique and healthy ways to effectively communicate and navigate your way through conflict. This is the last in our four-part series about how to effectively navigate conflict. Today, we discuss changing conflict into joint problem solving. When we're in conflict with someone else, it means that we each have a [...]
This four-part blog series will explain 4 unique and healthy ways to effectively communicate and navigate your way through conflict. In the last blog on effectively navigating conflict, we discussed avoiding words that place responsibility for what we're feeling onto someone else during times of conflict. In the first blog, we talked about finding fault, blaming and [...]
This four-part blog series will explain 4 unique and healthy ways to effectively communicate and navigate your way through conflict. In the first part of this series, we discussed avoiding the use of judgment, blame and criticism when we find ourselves in conflict with someone else. The types of negative words are certain to increase, rather [...]