I’m hoping this new post will find you interested enough to spend some of your valuable time traveling down this road with me; and I, of course, always hope that you’ll ultimately find it to be beneficial to your clients and you.
You’ll first need to read the following recently published article to understand what I intend to accomplish with this latest post (this series will be in at least two, if not three, separate parts):
“Ex-Wife Of US Oil Baron To Appeal $1 Billion Divorce Award”
And then read this “follow-up story” which was printed several days later:
“Oklahoma Oilman’s Ex-Wife Plans To Appeal Nearly $1 Billion Divorce Settlement”
Briefly, in Oklahoma after a 9-week trial, the family court judge awarded the wife one billion dollars [if I’m counting the zeroes correctly, I believe that’s $1,000,000,000] … and her attorney stated that this amount was “not equitable” to his client, because the husband’s current worth was approximately $18,000,000,000, and that the wife would appeal the family court judge’s decision.
In an effort to create some measure of scope as to the size of the wife’s award, Forbes Magazine listed the 1000th wealthiest person in the world as having an estimated “worth” of $1.8 billion dollars. I’ll also break it down this way: if your gross income was $100,000 a year, it would take you 10,000 years to earn one billion dollars.
However, in this Oklahoma case, as in so many others in South Carolina and across this nation, the amount of this award had absolutely nothing to do with this wife’s ability to sustain and enjoy the quality of her life and her lifestyle, at its maximal level, forever … rather, it had everything to do with this “fallacy of fairness” which every family court mediator encounters in virtually every mediation where the parties are dividing up “things” which they possessed “as of the commencement date of (their) marital litigation”.