The Oklahoma Supreme Court decides that an Oklahoma Firefighters Deferred Retirement Option Plan, or DROP, may be divided as marital property, even though the employee has yet to enroll in the plan. The Facts In Marriage of Baggs, the firefighter husband was vested in what the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System calls Plan [..]
People getting a divorce generally do not make good business partners. One Oklahoma couple learned this the hard way. After trying to maximize the return on their marital residence, they ended up back in court ten years later. The Original Plan When the couple divorced in 1995, they entered into a settlement agreement which placed [..]
In Part I of this topic, I discussed how stock options are characterized as marital or separate property. Part II of this topic addressed the valuation and distribution of stock options in divorce actions. This last in the series, Part III, discusses the information needed to divide stock options in divorce. Each case involving stock [..]
Suppose you married someone who owes child support from a prior marriage. The support checks to the prior family go out each month, drawn on an account containing funds earned during your marriage. Then the second relationship sours. Can you recover an equitable share of marital funds used by your spouse to pay a pre-existing [..]
In Part I of this topic, I discussed the characterization of stock options as marital or separate property. After determining the marital and separate property component of each stock option, the next step is to value and divide the option. The following Part II of this topic addresses the valuation and distribution of stock options [..]
An employee stock option gives an employee the right to buy a specified number of shares of stock in the employer-corporation at a specified price (strike price) at a specified future time. The goal is to give the employee an incentive for the stock price to go up, making the stock option more valuable. Companies [..]
How do you value a small business when one of the partners is getting a divorce? A shareholder agreement carried the day to reduce the value of a law practice in a court opinion released this week. The Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals in Kingery v. Kingery excluded goodwill as an asset to be divided, [..]
