Growth Niche
In some ways, Smith’s divorce specialization is no accident. “I’m sure Sigmund Freud would’ve had a field day with it,” she says. “I come from a long line of divorces in my family. My folks got divorced when I was 3. My great-grandmother got divorced in the ’50s. I’ve been divorced twice. The client base that was attracted to me early in my career were women, and I ended up with a disproportionate share of divorced clients. I had a divorce lawyer as a client who’s now one of the top divorce lawyers in the country. It was this confluence of things that got me set out in specializing in this.”
Smith notes that divorce is a $50 billion industry, and that much of her practice involves handling the highest-net-worth divorces in New York, Connecticut and California. “My number one referral source are top divorce lawyers nationwide,” she says. “I do a ton of speaking at the symposiums and conferences for the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, and I get a lot of referrals from my speaking engagements or client referrals.”
Smith says a lot of people tell her they want to do what she does in the divorce field. She sets them straight on the realities of serving this segment. “It’s a growth niche business, but you’ve got to be comfortable with rage, conflict, with people fighting in your office; with not being able to control a lot of pieces of the process with the work changing quickly; with court deadlines; with being able to sit in settlement negotiations with both lawyers. I sometimes really have to be careful to not take it home with me after a long day of divorce meetings.
“It can be hard, but I have a really good skill set for it because I’m a natural mediator,” she continues. “You see people at their worst. People share very personal stuff with me they probably haven’t shared with other people. If I didn’t have the personality and skill set that I have to deal with this, I wouldn’t be good at it no matter how good a business opportunity it is.”
When she decided to focus on this niche, Smith set out to study it closely. Speaking at a Financial Advisor/Private Wealth Family Office conference in late September, she recalled how she would often take Fridays off to attend divorce proceedings to glean what types of testimony and fact patterns exerted the greatest influence over ultimate outcomes. In many cases, the key asset would be a privately held family business and the key witnesses would be valuation experts who were often CPAs.
As witnesses, these professionals were often dry and boring. Smith told conference attendees of various efforts the attorneys would employ to reinforce their testimony in the judge’s mind. Once she saw an attorney pick up his briefcase, hold it over his head, and drop it on the floor to wake the snoring judge out of his slumber.
Today, she’s aided in her divorce practice by a team of four, including an attorney, who work closely with divorce attorneys; help with the forensic accounting of divorce in tracing expenses, bank accounts and funds; and deal with alimony, child support and other separations of assets. They can be hired by one party or both parties. Smith is also a certified divorce mediator and regularly does mediation so people don’t have to go to court.
In essence, this support staff is doing the divorce work at the time of the divorce, while Smith and Jaclyn Cerbone, assistant vice president of wealth management, do the post-divorce wealth management.
The Specialist
December 1, 2014
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