Oil tycoon Harold Hamm was ordered by a court in November to pay his ex-wife nearly one billion dollars as a part of their divorce settlement. The property involved included four multi-million dollar homes, an airport hangar as well as items as mundane as a geode in quartz display. Did his attorneys used Divorce Financials family lawyer software to evaluate the property and calculate the settlement?
Well, no, probably not. Lawyers in billionaire divorces generally have teams of accountants poring over stacks of documents and using very expensive accounting software packages. However would it have been possible to use Divorce Financials in this divorce? Maybe.
You can enter assets and liabilities with values of up to $9,999,999,999.99 each — that’s just under $10 billion if you lost track of the commas — and Divorce Financials can work with total assets or liabilities in the hundreds of billions. Each asset can be given individual distributions, either by dollar value or by percentage. What more do you need from divorce financial software?
Then again most billionaires, unlike Mr. Hamm, have prenuptial agreements that make these calculations unnecessary. However he was a starry-eyed, middle-aged mere millionaire when he married his future wife so maybe he was still young enough to take a chance on love.
Mr. Hamm came by most of his billions through a single underground reservoir of oil on some land he purchased. One of the key points during the trial was whether this strike was skill or luck. If it were skill, then Oklahoma law says that his wife would share in that money. If it were luck, then it would not be considered marital property and the money would be Mr. Hamm’s but not Mrs. Hamm’s. Using Divorce Financials, his attorneys could have set up different scenarios that used distribution schemes pending the court’s ruling, or could have come up with distributions that would satisfy both parties without the need of a judge.
Whether your clients are fighting over multi-billion dollar oil reserves or that set of dishes they bought at a flea market ten years ago, you need to be able to inventory and value all assets and liabilities to come up with a fair property settlement. Divorce Financials divorce software for attorneys gives you those capabilities as well as tools to value pensions or lump-sum alimony, and to calculate the tax implications of alimony and child support scenarios.
