Unless you have been living under a rock for the last four weeks, you know how COVID-19 has upended the nation. The very limited upside of the pandemic is that it is allowing divorce lawyers time to rethink the provisions in routine marital settlement agreements and consider whether we need to include a “standard” force majeure clause.

This occurred to me in a case where one party was to retrieve personal items within a certain time frame in the agreement. When I followed up with my client, they told me that the personal property had not been retrieved because the movers cancelled—the moving company had been closed as a nonessential service. This brought to mind other instances where agreements feature obligations that must be carried out in a set sequence and the impossibility of those action items under current circumstances.