Beth McCormack

Somewhere along the way, people started to think that an aggressive attorney was a skilled attorney.

People ask me this all the time. Don’t I need the toughest, most combative lawyer I can find? Don’t I need someone to fight for me?

I get it. You're scared and mean feels like it might protect you.

It won't.

An aggressive lawyer who picks a fight over everything, who sends the nasty emails and texts to opposing counsel, who files every motion possible, that attorney is not fighting for you. They're just fighting, and you're the one writing the checks while your case drags on for months longer than it had to.

The lawyers who get the best results are rarely the loudest ones in the room. They know when to push and when pushing costs you more than it gains.

Mean doesn't mean good. It just means you're mean.

Smart and strategic is everything.

A business owner can "win" the divorce and still lose the company.

That is not a worst-case scenario. It is what happens when the corporate documents were never built with this in mind.

You spent years building a business. Hiring the right people. Structuring ownership carefully. Protecting it from competitors, from lawsuits, from market downturns. But most business owners never think to protect the company from a divorce, because it does not feel like a business risk. It feels like a personal one.

It is both.

A buy-sell agreement signed years ago that never planned for a divorcing owner. A valuation nobody has revisited since the company was a fraction of what it is worth today. An ownership structure built on the assumption that every partner's marriage lasts forever. Any one of these can quietly determine the outcome of a case before anyone sits down to negotiate.

The business owners who come through this with the company intact are almost always the ones who looked at these documents early, with the right team around them, before a filing turned the paperwork into evidence.

You built it. Protect it before you have to.

I have seen people spend months fighting over a coffee maker. Or a w**d whacker. Or the television set. So many negotiations over television sets.

None of these fights are really about the item. It is not about what they cost or what they are worth. It is about wanting that feeling of having "won" something in a process that had already taken almost everything else they thought they controlled.

The coffee maker is never actually about the coffee maker.

For many of my clients, it is not even about the house, because there are three other homes in the portfolio. It is not about the art on the wall, because both sides could replace it tomorrow. Feeling unheard. Feeling erased. Wanting to walk away with proof that something was actually yours.

The couples who move through this fastest are the ones who can name what they are really fighting for, out loud, early. Not the house. Not the coffee maker. The thing underneath it.

You end up fighting about things that were never really about money.

The media is fascinated with the $4.7 billion number in the Paulson divorce. While that is an attention-getting number, it's not the real story.

At that level of wealth, walking into a marriage without a prenuptial agreement does not just leave a question unanswered. It leaves the entire financial history of the marriage to be reconstructed, years later, under far worse circumstances than if it had been documented from the start. That is exactly what happened here. John Paulson and his ex-wife Jenny spent five years in that reconstruction, not arguing over how to divide the money, but establishing where it came from. Which trusts held what. Which properties were separate and which had become marital. What nearly two decades of financial decisions actually meant.

I have sat across the table from families untangling exactly this kind of history. It is slow, forensic work, and it is almost always more costly, in time, in privacy, in what it puts a family through, than the conversation that could have happened before the marriage began.

This was never really a fight over the size of the estate. On one side, the argument was that she had never been given the full financial picture. On the other, the argument was that the structures in place were legitimate, and always had been. Two sides working from two different sets of facts, for five years. That gap is what kept this family in court, not the dollar figure.

A prenup would not have settled every disagreement here. But it does something litigation never can: it lets two people have the conversation about what is acceptable while they still have every reason to be reasonable with each other. Once a divorce turns adversarial, that window closes. Positions harden. Every disclosure becomes a negotiating chip instead of a fact. The same conversation that might have taken an afternoon before the marriage began can take five years and cost a fortune once it has to happen inside a courtroom instead.

You don't write the agreement in the middle of the fight. You write it before there is one.

Financial uncertainty between spouses does not stay quiet for long. It becomes suspicion. Suspicion becomes accusation. By the time a case reaches me, the fight is often no longer about the money itself. It is about what one person believes the other was hiding, whether or not anything actually was.

More than three decades in this work has taught me that suspicion is often more destructive than the divorce itself. It does not just make things tense. It makes people unable to accept even a fair outcome, because they do not trust the numbers behind it.

I look at these cases with a critical eye toward exactly where the uncertainty lives, and I build the right team around answering it. Sometimes that is revisiting a trust that has not been touched in years. Sometimes it is tracing records across entities that go back further than anyone expected. The goal is never to find someone at fault. It is to replace suspicion with facts, quickly and quietly.

A case does not start the day you file it. It starts the day you start paying attention.

Somewhere along the way, during your divorce or separation, your child can become the messenger.

"Tell your father dinner is at six."

"Ask your mother if she got the check."

It starts small, plain logistics passed through a child because the two adults are not speaking directly. Then it grows. The child starts carrying feelings instead of facts. Frustration dressed up as information. An opinion dressed up as a question.

Almost no parent does this on purpose. Most do not even notice they are doing it.

But think about what you are actually asking your child to carry. Not a message. A piece of an argument they did not start and cannot end. That is not parenting in that moment. That is asking a child to do a job that was never supposed to be theirs.

The parents who protect their children best build a way to communicate that does not run through their kids. A shared calendar. A single written channel. A professional in-between when things are too raw for either parent to be that channel themselves.

Your child is not a courier. Whatever you need to say to your ex, say it yourself.

The first meeting is never what people expect.

They arrive braced for a conversation about accounts and houses and who keeps what. That conversation matters, and it comes. But it is not where we begin.

We begin with one question. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being ready to proceed today, what number would you give me?

There is no wrong answer. A three tells me something a seven does not, and both are welcome in the room. The number cuts through what the paperwork never can, whether this is a decision already made, or a fear being said out loud for the first time.

And almost every time, the person knows their number before I finish the sentence. They just needed someone to ask.

Last week our team traded petitions and prenups for pasta.

We spent an afternoon at learning to roll, shape, and (mostly) laugh our way through fresh pasta from scratch. No case strategy, no client calls. Just flour on our hands, good food and good company.

There's something I love about seeing my team outside the office. The same people who bring precision and care to some of the hardest days in our clients' lives, showing up for each other in a completely different way. It reminded me how grateful I am to work alongside people I genuinely enjoy being around.

Family Law asks a lot of the people who do it well. Moments like this matter.

The most important number in a high-profile divorce is often the one no one gets to see.
That is not an accident.

When aircraft, vehicles, real estate, and intellectual property are divided, the public may focus on the glamorous assets. The real strategy may be keeping the dollar figure out of view.

Once a number becomes public, it can follow both people into future negotiations, business deals, and even the next relationship.

The same is true for intellectual property. A public persona, a brand, a podcast, or creative work can become an asset that has to be valued, divided, and protected.

The number you never see is usually the one that mattered most.