Replacement Prenuptial Agreement for Couple

• Beneficiary: Mr. Ying
• Signatory: Ms. Jo
• Case Type: Prenuptial Agreement
• Country/Region: Taiwan, China / Singapore
• Challenges:
  • Mr. Ying has his own attorney who has prepared the prenuptial agreement but the contract is very poorly formatted and badly written
  • Both the husband and the wife had no knowledge of what it meant to have a prenuptial agreement so every step of the process needed to be explained to them in detail
  • Mr. Ying’s former attorney was very disorganized, resulting in our firm needing to tidy up a lot of his work
  • Necessary documents had been improperly filed and were not notarized so our firm had to correct many clerical errors

BACKGROUND

To the couple, marriage is all about love but to a bank and to the government, it’s all about the legal bond that makes two former strangers into a “family”. For many of us, this union of people is simple but for someone like Mr. Ying who came from a wealthy estate and worked for a Fortune 100 Company, this union can get quite complicated.

First off, when Mr. Ying was just a child, his parents had begun purchasing things in his name for a variety of reasons. Maybe they knew one day the property would become his or maybe it was to diversify their tax burden. Either way, when Mr. Ying proposed to Ms. Jo, Ying’s parents immediately chimed in. It’s not that they didn’t believe in their love, but they just wanted to make sure that in some worst-case scenario, that Ying’s parents wouldn’t be handing over their property to Ms. Jo just because they bought it under Mr. Ying’s name many years ago.

That sounds simple enough; we just need to protect Mr. Ying’s parents’ items, right? Well, once you sit down with a lawyer and start talking about what would happen in case you two would ever get divorced, things just get more difficult.

Eventually, the lawyer Mr. Ying had found told him that he couldn’t in good conscious tell Ms. Jo to sign this prenuptial agreement. He was hired to represent Mr. Ying and not Ms. Jo, Ms. Jo needed to have her own lawyer that will make sure that she is properly represented.

That’s when Mrs. Jo came to Tsang and Associates.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

When Mrs. Jo came to us, she had no idea what she was doing. Mr. Ying’s lawyer had not spoken to her in detail and had only told her she would need to get her own lawyer to represent her. Worse yet, her fiancé and his parents were terrified of who she might find. A greedy lawyer might meet her, see the wealth of her soon-to-be family and see an opportunity to try and take some of that wealth for himself or for their client. Thankfully for her and for the family, she came to the right place.

We agreed to only take a mild fee since we were just going to be advising her which immediately put her mind at ease. Rather than advise Mrs. Jo to be greedy and to ask for more in her agreement, we explained to her what the prenuptial agreement said, told her that much of this was standard for a prenuptial agreement and allowed her to come to her own conclusions. If she wanted something changed, we would help but we never told her to pursue something she didn’t want.

After reviewing her prenuptial agreement, we realized pretty quickly that her husband’s attorney was… well… disorganized and a poor writer. The way he had organized the contract was slightly misleading and especially confusing for our young couple. No wonder Ms. Huang and her fiancé didn’t understand what was happening — the contract barely made sense. We decided to help them rewrite it in a way that we could all understand for only a small fee which both of them were very happy with. Once we finished with it, we discovered the other attorney had improperly filed the necessary paperwork and never had the contract notarized — both of which are huge mistakes that need to be rectified for the contract to be binding. We supplied this service as well and walked them through the whole process, making sure they were both happy along the way.

OUTCOME

In the end, the only thing we really “changed” as part of the prenuptial agreement was the structure of alimony payments. This was quickly agreed upon and within no time, we had Ms. Huang and her fiancé are both coming to us for legal advice instead of Mr. Ying’s former attorney.

With the new contract being totally agreed upon by both the husband and wife, Ms. Huang and Mr. Ying were ready to get married. After their beautiful wedding, we were happy to see that they came back to us for more advice. Within a few months after that, they were followed by Mr. Ying’s parents who also needed some legal counsel. After all, a prenuptial agreement needs to be just that: an agreement. We’re proud that our services were something the whole family could agree upon.