You should hire an attorney or a law firm to prepare your prenuptial agreement. In New York, it is highly recommended to consult an attorney about your and your fiancé’s circumstances to protect your rights and assets. Since you cannot know for certain where you will be in ten or twenty years (or sometimes even less time), an attorney will help you consider the possibilities and tailor the agreement according to your specific concerns, whether it is related to protecting particular assets, inheritances, or businesses, or regarding alimony obligations.

In addition to ensuring you meet the requirements of a valid prenuptial agreement, an attorney can help you understand the specific rights that New York assigns spouses when they marry. Moreover, to properly waive these rights or modify the default rules upon separation or divorce, an attorney describes the most important laws that would apply without a prenup.

A prenuptial agreement is a legally technical contract. You want to be represented by an attorney who works with New York Marital Laws daily and specializes in premarital agreements. Novak & Novak P.C. has dedicated its practice primarily to prenuptial agreements. Our firm prides itself in consistently reviewing and preparing many prenuptials and postnuptials. Therefore, we are well versed in the current case law and New York’s Appellate Court & Divisions rulings that can affect our clients now and in the future.

Although it is highly recommended that your spouse obtain their own attorney, it is technically not required that your spouse obtain independent legal counsel for your prenuptial agreement to be valid in New York. It is enough that a party has the opportunity to hire an attorney and decides to forgo one anyway. That is, we can still help you even if your partner does not get their own attorney. However, each party should have their own legal counsel to protect each person’s interests and agree to their terms voluntarily. This may seem costly at the moment, but compared to the costs of litigation when someone tries to overturn a prenup, it is a small insurance policy to pay upfront. Your attorney will protect your needs and assets, and the spouse’s attorney will do the same.

It will be much more difficult for a spouse to argue later that they did not understand what they signed and agreed to after their attorney explained precisely what the document means or negotiated it at their request. Moreover, if your spouse does not have an independent lawyer, courts will look at the agreement critically when asked to invalidate it during a divorce.

More importantly, it is not advisable that you and your fiancé consult with the same attorney in preparing a prenuptial agreement because of a potential conflict of interest and the possible appearance of one person pressuring the other to sign. Divorce attorneys often weaponize both of these factors to try and overturn prenups years later. In addition, any conversations between you and your attorney in front of a third party, such as your partner, could lose attorney-client privileges, including confidentiality.

Rest assured, our experience and command of marital agreement law enhance our capacity to guide you and ensure your agreement is executed properly.

Document preparer services recommend you consult an attorney for legal questions or concerns. While that should tell you all you need to know about the value (or lack thereof) these companies provide, our low fixed-fee attorney rates remove any doubt. Still, clients occasionally bring in a template they completed online to see if we can work with it, and an attorney has to start from scratch every single time. Surprisingly, our firm has even received what appear to be templates from the attorneys of clients’ partners who lack experience in this area. Fortunately, we can essentially rewrite the agreement to be valid and protect our client. The attorneys at Novak & Novak P.C. are very thorough, especially regarding prenuptial agreements, and your assets and potential financial security are worth the protection we can help create.