Family · January 30, 2025 · 6 min read
When the assets are in three countries: cross-border divorce in 2025
High-net-worth divorces increasingly involve assets in multiple jurisdictions — operating businesses, trusts, real estate, art. Coordinating across legal systems, tax regimes, and disclosure obligations is its own discipline.
A high-net-worth divorce in 2025 is rarely confined to one jurisdiction. The assets are in operating businesses across multiple countries, in trusts established under foreign law, in real estate held by SPVs, in art and other movables. Resolving the financial side of the dissolution — fairly, quietly, and in ways that hold up — has become its own practice within family law.
What makes the cross-border case distinctive
Domestic high-net-worth divorces are intricate; cross-border cases are intricate in different directions. The marital property analysis depends on which jurisdiction's law applies, which often depends on facts that the parties dispute. The disclosure regimes do not align: a party honoring full disclosure obligations under New York law may be constrained from full disclosure by a Swiss bank secrecy statute that, locally, has criminal teeth.
And the tax consequences of any settlement are jurisdiction-specific. A division of a trust interest that is tax-neutral in the US can be a taxable event in the UK, and vice versa. Without coordinated tax counsel from the outset, the parties can agree on a settlement that fails — financially — by the time it is implemented.
The early decisions matter most
Choice of forum
The first strategic decision in many cross-border cases is . It is not always the case that one party wants to file in their home jurisdiction; what matters is which jurisdiction's substantive and procedural law produces the better outcome on the central financial issues. We have seen clients prefer to litigate in England rather than New York for disclosure reasons; others prefer New York for support and equitable distribution reasons.
Once a case is filed in a jurisdiction with , the other party's options narrow. This is why the very first conversations with counsel are often the most consequential ones in the entire matter.
Trust analysis
Trusts are where many cross-border divorces live or die financially. The questions are layered: Is the trust a marital asset under the governing law of the divorce? Is it a marital asset under the law of the trust's jurisdiction? Does the spouse have a beneficial interest the court will treat as economic? Can the court order distribution from a trustee who is in another jurisdiction and not subject to the divorce court's jurisdiction?
We have had cases where a trust was nominally outside the marital pot under the divorce-jurisdiction law but where the operating reality — the spouse's regular receipt of distributions, the trustee's deference to the spouse's wishes — produced a different result on appeal. The doctrinal label varies; the reality does not.
Disclosure and confidentiality
The competing obligations
Full and frank disclosure is a foundational principle of New York equitable distribution. Several other jurisdictions enforce confidentiality obligations — Swiss banking regulation, certain trust deed confidentiality clauses — that conflict with full disclosure. Resolving this conflict is rarely as simple as “disclose what you have to.”
We coordinate with local counsel in the relevant jurisdictions before discovery responses are drafted, so the client is not put in the position of either contempt of the divorce court or violation of foreign law. In several cases, we have used in-camera judicial review and protective orders to bridge the gap.
Subpoenas across borders
Subpoenas — to foreign banks, foreign trustees, foreign business partners — require treaty mechanisms (Hague Evidence Convention, MLATs in some cases) and coordinated timing. The lead time on these is months, not weeks. A litigation strategy that does not account for the subpoena timeline often runs into walls during settlement discussions.
What we have learned about settlement
Most cross-border cases settle. They settle because the alternative — multi-year litigation across three jurisdictions, public proceedings in some of them, recurring re-litigation as parties move — is rarely in either party's interest at scale. The settlements that work are the ones where the implementation has been thought through across jurisdictions: tax counsel signed off, trustee consents are in place, real estate transfer mechanics are agreed, and the order can be domesticated where it needs to be domesticated.
The settlements that fail are the ones where the parties agreed on outcomes without agreeing on mechanics. We have seen settlements signed and re-litigated in the implementation phase because the tax consequences of the agreed division were never modeled, or because a trustee abroad refused to cooperate with consent that was assumed.
The takeaway
High-net-worth cross-border divorce is a discipline. The clients who do well are not necessarily the ones with the most assets — they are the ones who choose counsel that can hold the strategy across jurisdictions and bring in the right local and tax counsel before, not after, the strategic decisions are made. By the time a settlement is on the table, the work that determines whether it actually holds has already been done.