Divorce and family transitions
Family law overlaps with our practice more than people might expect. A divorce involves dividing retirement accounts, a home, and sometimes a business: the same assets an estate plan is built around. When those worlds collide, having one attorney who understands both is a real advantage.
We handle dissolution of marriage, division of community and separate property, and the retirement-account issues that come with it, including the qualified domestic relations orders (QDROs) needed to divide pensions and 401(k)s, including pensions administered through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. We also advise on premarital and marital agreements, both in drafting them and in addressing their enforceability.
Our focus is on later-in-life divorce, where the financial questions are usually more complex than the custody ones, and where an existing estate plan almost always has to be reworked as part of the process.
Divorce Later in Life
Ending a marriage after decades is different from ending a short one. The finances are deeper and more tangled: retirement accounts built over a career, a home owned outright, possibly a trust the two of you created together, an estate plan that names your spouse throughout. Untangling all of it at once is genuinely complex work, and doing it in two separate silos, one lawyer for the divorce and another for the estate side, is how important things get missed.
This is a core focus of our practice. In one place, we can address:
Dividing retirement assets, including tracing separate-property contributions, valuing pensions, and preparing the QDROs required to divide them
Characterizing property, sorting community from separate when accounts have been mixed together over many years, which is often the hardest and highest-stakes question in a long marriage
Rebuilding your estate plan: a divorce doesn't automatically fix a trust and will that still name your former spouse; that has to be done deliberately, and the timing matters
Marital agreements, where a prior agreement governs part of the outcome
Handling the dissolution and the estate consequences together means the two halves actually fit, rather than a divorce judgment that quietly contradicts the estate plan.