Source: https://levinedisputeresolution.com/divorce-mediation-blog/tag/divorce_lawyers/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 19:14:06+00:00

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We read with interest about the pending case Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) case, Katz Nannis & Solomon, PC v. Levine (no relation), in the October 12, 2015 issue of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. Holland & Knight’s Attorney Gordon P. Katz wrote “SJC to Consider Expanded Review of Arbitrators’ Awards”, about the case, a civil action between estranged shareholders of an accounting firm. The question on appeal arises from an arbitration agreement; and specifically whether or not parties can bind each other and the court to rights of review that are broader than those that are set forth in the Massachusetts version of Uniform Arbitration Act.
One of the more frequently cited impediments to the growth of divorce arbitration, despite its manifest opportunities (efficiency, expediency, convenience, privacy, cost and control of selection of decision-maker), is that lawyers are deterred by the general loss of appellate rights. While everyone is well aware that appeals are rare, lengthy, obscenely costly, often inconclusive and always unpredictable, they are slow to relinquish the fail-safe for the true outlier result that they may encounter. We certainly understand the defensive impulse: divorce litigation clients are among the more litigious with their lawyers, post-divorce.
We have long believed that the law should allow people to agree to that level of review that they, as competent contracting parties, feel is appropriate. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers Model Family Law Arbitration Act, includes the right of parties to elect appeal of errors of law to the trial court judge, in the first instance, then to the appellate level. The local AAML has advanced a Massachusetts version of that model act here, without success so far. It, too, contains that right to vary review and appeal provisions.
We hope that the SJC recognizes this important contractual right; and that if they do, divorce lawyers will take another look at matrimonial arbitration.
The divorce bar does not often look to the federal trial court for guidance in family law matters. In fact, outside of discovery and the Rules of Civil Procedure, we rarely look to federal courts at all when constitutional rights are not at issue.
But U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young’s ruling in Irish v. Irish is a noteworthy exception.
Young’s findings and conclusions establish contractual liability from a former husband’s false statement on his Supplemental Probate Court Rule 401 Financial Statement, filed in a Middlesex Probate & Family Court divorce case and referred to in a separation agreement that the state court incorporated into its divorce judgment. Critically, the agreement survived incorporation in the judgment and did not merge therein.
The federal case concerns a payout to defendant Craig S. Irish that plaintiff Dawn E. Irish, and now Judge Young, view as a form of phantom equity, in which the former wife has continuing contractual rights. Young makes quick and eloquent work of Mr. Irish’s contention that a substantial sum received by him afer divorce was merely a bonus and, thus, outside the scope of Ms. Irish’s property claims.
In our last 2 entries, we reviewed the common central holding of these three cases; namely, that with the sole exception of the presumptive general term alimony durational limits for marriages that lasted 20 or fewer years, alimony payors under judgments that preceded the Alimony Reform Act (eff. 3.1.12) (ARA) cannot benefit from the presumptive retirement age termination provisions of the statute; and, then, the unfortunate treatment of cohabitation in Chin v. Merriot.
Now, we dig into the footnotes of Rodman v. Rodman and worry about a return engagement that Footnote 5 invites with 2001’s Huddleston v. Huddleston. Yikes! We apologize in advance for the length of this blog.
Generations of lawyers and clients have chosen between two distinct forms of support agreement: those that merge in the Probate and Family Court’s divorce judgment; and those that survive incorporation with independent legal significance. The differences were stark.
Survival meant that parties together could preclude the court from changing their agreed contractual alimony terms absent express subsequent agreement. Appellate courts limited this power at certain extremes (public charge and major default exceptions of Knox v. Remick and Stansel v. Stansel); but in the main, this prerogative, once incorporated into a divorce judgment, was solid and predictable.
For everyone else, there was merger. Modification of merging agreements, by definition, mirrored judge-made decisions. The parties did not challenge the trial court’s right to modify all support terms of judgments into which agreements had merged, when the circumstances in which they were negotiated had materially changed. Everyone’s safety net was preserved by future court access. Sometimes merger was actively desired; and at others it was all that could be agreed. Everyone knew what they were getting, or so they thought.
The erosion between merger and survival began innocently enough with the SJC’s Bercume v. Bercume in 1999. In that case, Justice Marshall observed that the Probate and Family Court’s modification powers should be informed by the parties’ expressed intentions in merged agreements. The modifying court did not write on a clean slate, but on one in which the parties expressed intent ought be determined and respected. Bercume was a curb of sorts on the Probate and Family Court’s modification authority; but it did not shake the foundation of merger and survival theory.
That is, until Huddleston v. Huddleston came along. In Huddleston, the parties executed a merging support agreement that only identified death of either spouse, or remarriage of the alimony payee, as causes for automatic termination of payment obligations. Common professional understanding of this termination language was that death, remarriage or a judgment of modification for other materially changed circumstances would, or could, result in termination. This was so because of context: merger.
The Wife sought increased alimony; but instead, the trial judge ordered that support would continue unchanged, but then abate at the Husband’s age 65 (a proxy for retirement age - not a recognized concept in pre-ARA Massachusetts). The wife appealed and in Huddleston v. Huddleston, the Massachusetts Appeals Court vacated the age 65 cut-off.
Instead, the Appeals Court one-upped Bercume. Justice Duffly wrote that the trial court should have inferred that the parties’ silence about other bases for modification indicated their mutual intention that other modifications never occur. Relying on Bercume v. Bercume, and re-shaping it by extension, the Huddleston court vacated the termination provisions of the modification judgment, precluded as it were, by the sound of the parties’ silence.
Bercume’s erosion became Huddleston’s earthquake.
But, Huddleston made them wrong. In the new century, silence could be louder than words in a merged agreement. “Death or remarriage” no longer read like “death, remarriage or other material change of circumstances.” The parties’ merged agreement had been construed at the appellate level like a surviving contract. Ever since, divorce lawyers have struggled to preserve modification rights in merged alimony agreements, never knowing for sure the ultimate result, clarity and predictability taking the hit.
After Huddleston, just what was the difference between merger and survival?
Uncodified §4(c) of the ARA states that a court may not modify “… an existing alimony judgment in which the parties have agreed that their alimony judgment is not modifiable…” Unfortunately the drafters did not distinguish between merging and surviving agreements in this regard.
As a result, since ARA’s enactment, we have worried that this statutory choice, or oversight, would bring down the wall between merger and survival. In an earlier presentation of “The Seven Sins of Alimony”, we fretted that §4(c) could become “Bercume on steroids” in the appellate courts’ hands, meaning that parties’ recitals in merged support agreements might exceed the justifiable influence to which Bercume entitles them; and making them, instead, binding permanently on the court.
We agree that the first clause [of §4(c)] appears, by implication, to include merged agreements, and that the Legislature intended to honor clear expressions by the parties regarding the terms under which alimony may terminate.
Consigned to a footnote, but neither gratuitous nor insignificant because of its editorial placement, the SJC signaled that merged agreements, which evidence a mutual intent to deny the court authority to modify alimony, may have preclusive effect, as a matter of law. Now, where is the firewall between merger and survival?
This is when it gets really scary.
Some day, some party will ask the SJC to rule that a merged agreement that is silent about some or all modification contingencies should have the same legal effect as a surviving agreement that is similarly silent. In other words, in any form of agreement, if authority to modify is not spelled out in sufficiently specific form, modification ought be precluded.
How can the SJC say “no”, when Judge Duffly wrote both Rodman and Huddleston? If they do not, Bercume plus Rodman plus Huddleston will equal the end of merger as we know it. The circle will be closed and merged agreements will equal surviving agreements.
What then becomes of the thousands of merged agreements executed before and after Rodman? How can lawyers advise clients about modification rights or vulnerabilities with anything like assurance? Will people who cannot achieve a surviving agreement (as most cannot) default to a judge-made decision after trial to avoid the vagaries of appellate interpretation of modification rights in their merged deals? At least, so far, judgments entered by a judge, after trial, are still modifiable upon a material change of circumstances.
We hope that our projection proves more paranoid than correct. Otherwise, woe is to the alimony payors and payees, whose expectations of modifiability will be toppled. And what about legal counsel, who did not insist upon, or succeed in attaining, merged agreement language that anticipates every possible basis for a future modification by the court?
Now, that’s something that should keep alimony payors, payees and their counsel up at night.
At the November 22, 2013 MCFM Institute, and in many other settings, divorce lawyers, mediators and judges have considered and debated aspects of the interaction between the March 1, 2012 overhaul of Massachusetts alimony laws and the August 1, 2013 revamp of the Child Support Guidelines, here. One of the hottest topics was the apparently inconsistent way in which each body of law treats the other! At LDRC, we waded into the deep end by addressing the subject in two blog entries, which we have edited only lightly here for FMQ.
There, we said it. Many of them are very good at what they do -- responsible sorts, even; and they are nice people. In a field and among circumstances that tolerate and even encourage some pretty bad behavior, sometimes divorce lawyers are the only cool headed adults in the room. Yet, in a culture that values lawyers only when you need one, we are very free to stereotype and thus condemn a whole walk of professional life with cheap jokes and throwaway lines that if spoken about a race, a gender, a sexuality or an ethnicity, would be taboo. Not so with lawyers -- divorce lawyers foremost.
"Divorce lawyers, maybe. I've heard it said that you should never hire one that you like."
We do not say that there are not divorce lawyers who are irritating, difficult, even unlikable. We know a few. Some of them make a pretty good living, too. But, does this make "jerkiness an asset"? In the perverse sense that being difficult to deal with sometimes does make divorce cases longer and more than necessarily complex, and therefore more profitable for the lawyers, can that really be said to be an advantage for the client? Our answer is: "almost never".
Liking your divorce lawyer is no substitute for hiring one who is smart, skilled and measured; but most clients most of the time benefit most from competent counsel with whom they wouldn't mind breaking bread, too. In a relationship that begins with faith and is built on trust, confidence and a sense of pride in being publicly represented by this person, likability matters. It matters in the feelings engendered in the client (often while absorbing unavoidable disappointment), in the opposing spouse, in forensic specialists, in courthouse personnel and -- very much so -- in judges who decide cases.
As divorce mediators and family law arbitrators, we are much aware not only of the competent service that we try to provide, but also the quality of the experience for the lawyers and clients who work with us. In our corner of the business, jerkiness surely does not pay. We know that we see a self-selecting population of clients and counsel -- those who have opted out of the more confrontational or extreme forms of dispute resolution, so we see little of the reprehensible few that Ms. Graham damns with disingenuous praise. But, the cause of one brilliant jerk doesn't justify smearing an entire craft, and it certainly didn't add credibility to the Graham piece.

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