Wedding Vows
It might surprise some romantics that for many couples about to get married one of the items on the ‘To Do’ list is going to a lawyer to get a Prenuptial Agreement, intended to govern the financial share-out between them in the event that they divorce. After all, the statistics indicate divorce is a likely scenario. In the words of Nessa (in BBC’s Gavin and Stacey) to her fiancé Dave ‘How many times in your life do you get married? Two?…..Three?’
But the Prenuptial Agreement (PA) is not an agreement, at least in England. Until now, English law allowed it only to be persuasive in a divorce dispute, but not binding, and over the years many cases have been heard where one party seeks to overturn the PA on the grounds that it no longer represents an equitable outcome for them, or that they didn’t know what they were signing at the time! The ruling this week in the case of Granatino and Radmacher has gone some way to change that. She is a wealthy heiress, he was an investment banker who decided to return to his studies. They married, are now separated, and he wants a share of her fortune, which their PA specifically ruled out. The judges’ decision yesterday was that the PA was ‘decisive’, and they ruled against the husband. But they did not declare a PA to be legally binding so the lack of clarity continues.
The negotiator ’s problem is that an agreement which from the beginning is only persuasive, but not enforceable, isn’t worth much. Once the deal is done, the ‘Agree’ Step should be a formality which simply summaries what the parties have already concluded. Of course we know that often it is not a formality, but a continuation of the negotiation, maybe because there are issues which have been ignored, forgotten or deliberately left alone during the negotiation which will subsequently under