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One cup stretched a divorce six months
Asset division is where the emotion arrives. Once the big decisions are settled, splitting up the household turns into arguments over things like a favorite cup, and the process stalls on objects worth almost nothing.
Those extra months are billed by the hour. Half a year of legal fees can run from roughly $20,000 or $30,000 up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the lawyer. Some divorces have ended with both parties bankrupt.
The paperwork makes it worse. There is a stack of documents the client has to fill out, and the lawyer has to fill out the same stack, but the lawyer can only bill for part of it. The accountants who sort through the transactions then charge separately, so a single dispute over china sits on top of a process that is already slow, manual, and expensive.
Why do small objects cause the biggest divorce fights?
Behavioral economists have documented the endowment effect, where people value something more once they own it. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and colleagues showed it in 1990 experiments in which students who were given a mug asked for far more than other students would pay for the same mug. Objects also carry memories, so a cup can stand in for a shared history. The monetary value then stops mattering to the person arguing over it.
Why do divorces get billed by the hour?
Most lawyers in the United States bill hourly because legal work is hard to price in advance and varies enormously between cases. A dispute that drags on adds hours with each exchange of letters, meetings, and filings. Courts also add their own steps, such as scheduling and hearings, that cannot be rushed by the parties. Contested cases therefore cost far more than ones where the parties agree.
Why do accountants get involved in a divorce?
Dividing property requires knowing what is owned and when it was acquired, and in many places it matters whether something was acquired during the marriage. Accountants trace transactions across bank and brokerage records to separate those categories. Forensic accountants also look for assets that one side may have undervalued or left out. Their work is billed separately from the lawyers' because it is a different profession.
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