Separation Agreement Law
Vancouver's Experienced Separation Agreement Lawyer
Separation Agreements can solve matters between the parties. Often people are seeking a separation agreement for one purpose but then see how other paragraphs included solve other potential problems that they did not think of. For example if one is thinking of a separation agreement to solve issues regarding the children, wouldn’t it also be prudent to include the usual paragraph that says each party is responsible for their own debt and cannot create debt for the other party? Or perhaps there should be a paragraph where the parties each keep their own bank accounts free from the claims of the other party, or a paragraph that says the parties are free from the harassment of each other.
One must remember when one attends a lawyer’s office to draft the agreement, they are paying for the lawyer to draft the agreement and take the signature of that person. One is not paying for the lawyer to get the signature of the other party. So if the lawyer drafts the agreement and then one cannot get one’s spouse to sign, the lawyer still gets paid and one has wasted one’s money. It is better to talk to the other party and get oral agreement that the other party will sign the agreement, then pay the lawyer to draft the separation agreement.
There are many levels of signing the separation agreement. Sometimes the parties sign with no lawyer signature. Sometimes the parties use the same lawyer to witness their signatures. Most of the time they use different lawyers to witness each of their signatures. Often the highest level of security for the separation agreement is for the parties and their respective lawyers to include Certificates of Independent Legal Advice (which are basically certificates that the party understood the agreement and didn’t sign it because someone forced them to sign). This is a bigger job for a lawyer because he is not just witnessing a signature, he has to read the agreement and advise the client, therefore he isn’t charging a fee for witnessing a signature, he is charging a much larger fee for the advice and Certificate of Independent Legal Advice.