Divorce Attorneys for Business Owners in Surprise, AZ

Overview

A divorce late in a business owner’s working life raises a question younger owners do not face. The business was going to fund two retirements as one household. It now has to fund two households, and there is limited time left to rebuild.

That reality should shape the settlement rather than being discovered after it. Call for a free consultation.

Is the business community

Long Ownership and the Community Presumption

Under A.R.S. § 25-211 property acquired during the marriage is presumed community. After decades of ownership, most separate property claims have been diluted by time and by the mixing of community earnings into the business.

A.R.S. § 25-213 still protects a business owned before the marriage or received by gift or inheritance, along with its rents, issues and profits. Proving how much of today’s value is attributable to that original separate interest, thirty years on, is a documentary exercise that may no longer be possible, and the burden sits with whoever asserts it.

Division falls under A.R.S. § 25-318, equitably though not necessarily in kind, and without regard to marital misconduct.

The exit problem

Do Not Let the Divorce Force the Sale

A business sold under time pressure sells badly. Buyers can tell when a seller has to close by a date, and the discount is real.

That matters here because a divorce can create exactly that pressure. One spouse needs to be paid out, there is no liquidity elsewhere in the estate, and the only way to fund it looks like a sale. If that sale happens two or three years before it was planned, and before the succession or the management team was ready, both spouses end up with a share of a smaller number.

The alternatives are worth exploring properly. A structured buyout from future cash flow. An offset against retirement assets or the house. A deferred share of the eventual sale proceeds, which keeps the departing spouse’s upside intact and removes the pressure to transact now.

Each has drawbacks and each needs security. But an owner who accepts a forced sale as inevitable has usually not been advised, they have just been processed.

Running it meanwhile

What the Injunction Permits While You Decide

The injunction issued under A.R.S. § 25-315 on filing restrains both spouses from transferring, encumbering, concealing, selling or otherwise disposing of community property, with an exception for matters related to the usual course of business.

A sale of the business is plainly not the usual course of business. Neither is bringing in a partner, gifting equity to a child as part of a succession plan, or restructuring the entity, however long any of those were planned. Doing them without written consent or court permission is a breach, and a succession plan that has been discussed for years is not a defence.

The order has the force of a signed superior court order and is enforceable by contempt, binding the petitioner on filing and the respondent on service or actual notice.

If a genuine opportunity arrives mid-case, it can be dealt with. Ask the court. Owners get into trouble by assuming a commercially sensible decision is automatically a permitted one.