JSVHQI do not frame prenups as asset protection.
Asset protection is a structure and a timeline. A prenup is something more boring and more useful: both of you already know how this ends if it ends. The process is written down while you still like each other. That is not romance dying. That is two adults refusing to leave the most expensive decision of their lives to a default statute they have never read.
The default regime is the prenup you did not write. You are already in a contract. You just did not negotiate it.
The conversation is cheap now and expensive later
The hard conversation is not “I don’t trust you.” The hard conversation is “if this fails, here is what happens to the company, the cash, and the house.”
Have it before the wealth shows up.
Once you are already married and the operating company has gone from nothing to something, the other party will feel entitled to a large share of that pie. They were there for the grind. They watched the years. In their head the growth is jointly owned even if the work, the risk, and the capital were not. Fighting that feeling in court is a worse conversation than the one you refused to have at the kitchen table.
People treat “we’ll be fine” as a strategy. Sometimes they are. That is not the norm, and it is not a bet you should run with an operating company attached. You do not really know someone until the thing breaks and you have to manage the process. Love is a terrible diligence function. It is designed to miss what is in front of you.
What “half” actually is
Default marital regimes do not price who built the enterprise.
They price status: married, or not. Time: how long. Title: whose name is on the account. They are not a valuation of judgment, risk, or the years of work that made the shares worth anything. People hear “half” and think it means fifty percent of everything, as if the person who generated the value and the person who was present while it was generated are the same economic fact. They are not.
That is not an argument for starving anyone. A serious agreement gives both sides consideration. If one party walks away with nothing worth enforcing, you do not have an agreement. You have a document that a court will treat as a setup. Keep it simple. Make it real for both sides. Then stop adding clauses that exist to win an argument you are having in your head.
The company does not save you
Marrying with a company and no agreement is a bad default.
Shares in operating companies, holdings, and personal accounts are generally in play. Which ones, and on what theory, depends on where you are. The pattern does not. If the value lives in a company you run, a marital claim will try to reach the value. A holding company is not a force field. Neither is a personal account you thought was “yours” because the salary hit it first.
If you want the structure to mean something, the agreement and the cap table have to talk to each other. Family counsel who never see the operating documents will draft into a vacuum. Corporate counsel who never see the relationship will leave the personal side as a landmine. That gap is where people lose years.
We do not do jurisdiction shopping as a party trick, and we do not write family-law instruments. If you involve us early, the job is to pick a setup that treats the client as well as the law allows, while everything is still lawful to rearrange. Timing is the constraint. The existing piece on that is not about marriage, but the same clock: Asset protection isn’t a structure, it’s a timeline.
What should never go in the document
Keep it as simple as it can be and still be real.
Do not write a catalogue of personal grievances. Do not write lifestyle clauses you cannot prove and will not enforce. Do not write a punishment fantasy. Courts do not exist to referee your private scoreboard, and a document that reads like one is how you donate an unconscionability argument to the other side.
Do make sure both parties receive consideration. Do make sure the companies, the cash, and the personal assets are described in a way that matches how they actually sit, not how you wish they sat. Do make sure each side had a representative before anyone signed. If you skip independent advice because it felt adversarial, you saved a week and bought a later fight about whether the thing is even valid.
Founders add a special failure: they treat the operating company as “the business” and the marriage as “personal,” then are surprised when a claim treats the shares as the marriage. Dividends, salary, loans to the company, loans from the company, intellectual property sitting in a personal name, a 50/50 co-founder who is not the spouse: all of that has to be on the map before counsel drafts. Otherwise the agreement is clean and the cap table is a bomb.
Detach the couple from the negotiation
The worst way to do this is two people in love, at a table, trying to be their own advocates.
Before a draft exists, put one representative on each side. Lawyers, or another qualified proxy. You bring your wishes to your person. They bring theirs to theirs. The two of you stay a couple. The representatives do the ugly part.
That is not softness. It is how you keep the agreement from becoming the first fight of the marriage. It is also how you get consideration that survives: each side had someone whose job was to say no.
This is a service we run. Introductory conversation, then representatives, then counsel who will actually draft. The couple does not need to sit in the room while the numbers get argued.
What you are buying from us, and what you are not
JSVHQ is not a family-law firm. We will not pretend to be one.
Your family lawyer drafts the instrument and appears where a lawyer must appear. What you buy from us is the alternative map: the companies, the cash, the holdings, the personal accounts, the order of operations, and the counsel brief so those lawyers are not inventing your structure from a slide. We think in routes other than the first one a local solicitor puts on the table. We brief specialist family counsel. We do not advertise a magic trick, and we do not suggest anything that is not above board.
That engagement has a name: the Marriage Safeguard Policy.
It is a consultancy engagement, not a download. It is the A-to-Z process around the agreement: what must be true of the companies before anyone signs, who represents whom, what “simple” actually means on the page, and how the personal side and the corporate side stop contradicting each other. Per engagement, or hourly. We will not put a number on a webpage and pretend it is your matter.
The reader who finishes a prenup explainer and then “just does it” is not our client. Templates exist. Local counsel exists. What does not exist, unless someone is paid to own it, is a single person who can see the holding, the operating company, the personal accounts, and the relationship at the same time, and who will stop each adviser from writing a letter that contradicts the last one. That is the mandate. If your situation is a straightforward local marriage with no companies and no cross-border anything, you do not need us. You need two lawyers and an afternoon.
If you are already married, this is the wrong product. That is the Crisis Asset Protection Plan. If you are not married and you think that means you are safe, it does not. Informal relationships harden into claims. That is You do not need a wedding for a marital claim.
The test
Read the statute you are about to marry into. If you cannot explain, in one page, what happens to the company if you split, you do not have a plan. You have a mood.
A prenup does not make the marriage colder. It makes the failure mode boring. Boring is the point. The people who skip it are not more in love. They are more exposed, and they will discover it at the worst possible time, with the worst possible incentive on the other side of the table.
If you want that process owned by someone who is not also trying to be your spouse, start here: Book a consultation. Ask for the Marriage Safeguard Policy. Bring the cap table, not the speech about trust.