Financial Translation Services for Divorce Lawyers

We’ve blogged about important role that certified notarized and apostilled translations play in transnational divorce proceedings. Even after a divorce is finalized, parties often find themselves dealing with ‘buyer’s remorse’. And just like when buying a house or a car, a divorce decision is difficult to set aside. As Kojovic v. Goldman shows, even in extreme cases in which the value of a marital asset turns out to have been greatly undervalued – to the tune of millions of dollars – even then it is difficult to have a decision overturned.

In this particular case, the parties settled their divorce after they had exchanged the customary financial information, with the husband disclosing his minority interest in an information technology company. In the settlement the wife received nearly $1.5 million. However, about one month later the IT company was bought for $225 million. Needless to say the wife sued to set aside the settlement on the basis of fraud and unconscionability.

However, the court refused the claim, finding that the wife failed to state a valid cause of action, stating that ‘merely because she now believed her husband privately harbored a more optimistic assessment of the potential value of his minority interest in that company, or even had additional information that he kept to himself, was irrelevant.”

What is of particular interest in this decision is that the court specifically noted that the wife (a former equity research assistant and a finance professional) and her counsel and accountant all had the ability to avail themselves to any number of valuation and discovery procedures but expressly denied doing so.

So what could move a court to set aside a decision? One possibility is when foreign assets are involved and one party deceives the other by ‘hiding’ information in foreign languages – but even here it is the other party’s responsibility to secure proper certified apostilled foreign language translations during the discovery process.

Contact our legal document translation service to obtain certified Persian to English translation services, as well as certified document translations in any other language.

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