Asset Identification and Valuation

Marital assets

As part of the divorce process, it is necessary to identify, value, and divide the assets you and your spouse acquired during the marriage. Whether your case is resolved through settlement or trial, complete information about the extent and value of your assets is necessary to determine an equitable division of the marital estate. Especially following a longer term marriage, the expectation is that there will be an equal division of marital property.

During the discovery process, your attorneys have the opportunity to investigate the assets you and your spouse acquired during the marriage and to determine the value of these assets. Parties to divorce litigation, however, are not always candid and forthright in disclosing all assets or in providing a true estimate of their real value.

As part of the discovery process, typically your attorney will start by serving your spouse with interrogatories (written questions) and requests for the production of documents. Your spouse will be required to sign under oath within thirty days answers to questions inquiring as to marital assets and income. The requests for production of documents require the disclosure of documents such as tax returns, financial statements, investment account records, retirement account records, and banking records, which will help your lawyer identify and value marital property. After this information is received and analyzed, other discovery may be called for, including a deposition, at which your spouse would appear for oral questioning under oath, depositions of third parties, such as business partners and associates, and the service of subpoenas on third parties, such as banks, to obtain records which may not have been produced by your spouse. Often, it is best to gather information by subpoena instead of waiting for an honest disclosure from the other spouse, which may never come.

The lawyers at Katz, Manka, Teplinsky, Graves & Sobol, Ltd. are known for their skills at obtaining and analyzing information through discovery and their meticulous attention to detail, which may at times finds assets not previously disclosed by your spouse. We are highly skilled in complex dissolution actions involving closely-held family businesses and know how to determine the value of these businesses - which many times are the most valuable marital asset.

Depending on the case, we may retain an outside accountant to help us determine the fair market value of a closely-held family business. Even if the business was owned by your spouse prior to the marriage, the increase in the value of the business during the marriage many times will constitute marital property, especially if your spouse is actively involved in the family business. Sometimes, it may be necessary to retain other experts to value real property or other assets you and your spouse own. We have been known to seek out the leading valuation experts in the country with specialized skills in valuing certain types of businesses and business assets.

Hidden and dissipated assets

On occasion, our attention to detail has led us to discover two sets of company books and two versions of parties' tax returns. The lawyers at Katz, Manka, Teplinsky, Graves & Sobol, Ltd. are skilled at analyzing financial statements, tax returns, and banking records and at tracking spending to determine discrepancies between income, spending and assets identified during discovery. We have retained nationally recognized handwriting experts to determine when a document was prepared and signed, when we suspected that we had been provided forged documents created after the commencement of the divorce action. We have successfully had valued and returned to the marital estate assets sold and/or transferred prior to the dissolution in an attempt to hide these assets and prevent them from being considered part of the marital estate, in several instances returning to the marital balance sheet the value of millions of dollars of assets transferred into trusts in unsuccessful attempts to keep the assets from division. As the case warrants, we will leave no stone unturned to assure that all assets are accounted for and fairly valued, even those transferred in anticipation of divorce.

Non-marital assets

Non-marital assets are assets owned by a spouse prior to the marriage, are the passive appreciation of these assets during the marriage, or are assets acquired by gift or inheritance from a third party during the marriage. A party who maintains a non-marital claim has the burden of proof of establishing that assets owned at the time of the divorce are readily traceable to a non-marital source.

The lawyers at Katz, Manka, Teplinsky, Graves & Sobol, Ltd. are skilled at both proving and defending non-marital claims, as well as finding marital value in assets which previously were claimed as entirely non-marital. We know what documents are necessary to prove or disprove a non-marital claim, and we are skilled at analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of claims presented to us by the other spouse. As needed, we will retain outside accountants to assist in tracing your non-marital claim or in attacking a flawed non-marital claim.