I’ll start with a confession. I am not an estate attorney; I have not drafted a will. I am not a wealth management professional; I do not advise on financial or investment planning. I practice family law; I am a divorce lawyer. I know what I don’t know and trust those practitioners in the estates and wealth management areas to live by the same rule: limit yourself to what you know in areas of the law in which you feel comfortable. All that being said, I offer some of my expertise in an area where family law and estate law overlap.

The inspiration for this article is a client I have been representing for a few months. He and his wife have decided to go their separate ways and need help figuring out the economic claims ancillary to divorce. The biggest of those is the “who gets what” of a divorce, also known as equitable distribution.