Why mediating a prenuptial agreement can be beneficial:
A woman called me, distraught. She said that over the course of 4 months, she and her fiancé had paid about $10,000 in attorney’s fees, had months of stress and agony, and ended up getting married without having signed the prenup. Now, 3 months into their marriage, the unsigned prenup remained an issue, but their attorneys could not find a way to agree.
The confluence of their fears and their lack of confidence merged to produce a situation where they felt frozen and unable to move forward. When the husband’s lawyer said, “You might as well have her waive her rights to your pension and her rights of inheritance,” the husband did not know whether this was ‘standard,’ or unusual, and didn’t find a way to say “no,” to his lawyer – even though this was not his goal in entering into the prenup.
I met with them together, in a mediation session, and asked them what had been their original goals for the prenup. As we created a list of those goals, it became clear that they were quite aligned.
Robert owned some properties with his brother and mother, and wanted to keep those as separate property. Alicia was fine with that, that felt fair to her.
They asked me to use the prenup that their attorneys had drafted, and edit it. I had to do a lot of deleting, to take out all of the extraneous things that one attorney said was necessary to “protect” the client, and the other attorney refused to accept. I ended up with a postnuptial agreement that met their original goals.
They came in again, we read it through, they made a couple of changes, and then they signed it that night. They were both so happy to find a way to resolve this whole matter so smoothly, after a process which left them feeling frightened and that their conflicts were intractable.
The power of mediation!
Read more here to find out if a prenup is right for you.