Lawyer-Lawyer Prenup “Not Carefully Drafted”

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals affirmed and reversed in part a judgment involving interpretation of an agreement between two divorcing lawyers

The following facts appear to be undisputed for current purposes. The parties were married in 2010. They each entered the marriage with significant assets. Ms. Carome initially took care of the parties’ children from prior marriages, but she obtained a position as an attorney with the federal government in 2012. Mr. Carome was a partner at a private law firm throughout the marriage, earning over one million dollars a year.

The parties entered into a premarital agreement to govern the treatment of their assets before, during, and after the marriage. With specified exceptions, the agreement requires the parties to pay their earnings during the marriage into a joint marital account. The parties contributed to a joint account pursuant to the agreement until September 2013, when Mr. Carome closed the account.

The parties formally separated in November 2017. Ms. Carome subsequently filed a petition for divorce, and Mr. Carome filed a counter-petition. The trial court issued a divorce decree and resolved numerous contested issues. The present appeals focus entirely on claims relating to the premarital agreement.

The agreement

The foregoing considerations on both sides lead us to the following conclusions. The agreement is not carefully drafted, and it is internally inconsistent on the general question whether the marriage should be understood to end at the moment of separation or at the moment of divorce. The answer to that question under the agreement might well vary depending on the specific provisions at issue. Focusing on the provisions most directly at issue here, however, we agree with the trial court that the agreement is better understood to establish separation as the end point of the obligation to contribute to the joint account.

Holding

In sum, (1) we affirm the trial court’s ruling that Mr. Carome’s obligation to contribute to the joint account ended on the date of separation; (2) we reverse the trial court’s ruling that Mr. Carome was entitled to deduct payments made to the defined-benefit plan in years when Mr. Carome did not contribute to the joint account; (3) we affirm the trial court’s ruling that Mr. Carome’s earnings under the agreement included a prorated share of Mr. Carome’s 2017 law-firm compensation; (4) we hold that the trial court acted outside its discretion in concluding that Mr. Rollinger’s report complied with the requirements of Super. Ct. Dom. Rel. R. 26(a)(2)(B); (5) we hold that that error was harmless; and (6) we uphold the trial court’s ruling that Ms. Carome was not required to prove actual costs she suffered as a result of Mr. Carome’s breach of the agreement, beyond the loss of the financial contributions Mr. Carome was required to make under the agreement. We therefore vacate the judgment and remand the case to the trial court for further proceedings.

(Mike Frisch)