You and your spouse are in the same field. As medical providers, you feel like you’re a good team at work. One of you works specifically with children, and the other prefers to work with adults, so your practice can see anyone.
Unfortunately, the good work relationship you have didn’t translate into a good marriage the way you thought it would. Instead, you rarely see one another, and you’ve grown apart.
What should you do with your practice? Will it be necessary to divide it upon divorce?
If you and your spouse share a practice and have both invested into it during your marriage, it is a good idea to at least discuss how you’d like to divide it if you ever go your separate ways.
If you intend to continue working together, you may not need to sell the business or even have its value determined right now. Instead, you’ll want to think about setting up a contract for working together and to discuss the division of that property if it were to ever be sold. You should also talk about how you want to divide your share of the business if one of you decides to leave.
Since you have a good working relationship, you may not want to change that, and that’s fair. You don’t need to change what works. However, you should talk to your attorney about setting up arrangements for the business, so that it is shared between you in a partnership, not just through marriage.
In the case that one of you does decide to move on to a new practice, you could decide to sell, buy out your spouse’s share or take a payout for your own share, depending on who is leaving. If you plan to do that, you’ll need to have the business’s value assessed and divide the value of the business accordingly.
Your attorney will work closely with you if your business is going to be affected significantly by your divorce. This can be a tricky situation, but a Plano attorney will take steps to help you protect your interests and the integrity of your business.