Lish Forensics

​Dennis A. Lish, CPA CFE

College: Undergrad was at The George Washington University and the MBA program at St. John’s University.  He trained and has participated in Collaborative Family Law and he is a member of the South Palm Beach County Collaborative Law Group, the Collaborative Family Law Professionals of South Florida, the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals and Collaborative Family Law Council of Florida.

 

Those abilities important in litigation are also important in Collaborative engagements.  You have to be competent and experienced to examine the assets and the books and records of the principals in a divorce and you must know what to look for, as these engagements get to the real nitty-gritty of businesses and assets without having to deal with compliance to generally accepted accounting principles or carried using generally accepted auditing standards.  In forensics we look for clues to the puzzle.  You must have good communication skills among your litigation or collaborative colleagues as well as being able to present the facts clearly.  Sometimes you will have to tell the attorneys and their clients, things they do not want to hear. Sometimes you will be corrected.  That’s the process.  You must be aware that in divorce situations you are not always hearing the truth and you must be able to apply logic and the current law, to help the mechanics of this transition.

 

The Collaborative Group is larger than the sum of its parts.  It has flexibility and allows you to communicate with each other. That surpasses the rigidity of Court.  What could take 30 hours of motion papers in litigation might take a half hour discussion among the group, saving $12,000 or more and lots of aggravation.

 

In the Collaborative Group, the husband and wife each has their own counsel. They are not counsel to both parties, just their client. Then there is a Neutral Financial Professional (NFP), that can be a forensic CPA or a Financial Professional who can help finding and dividing the marital assets.  Third, there is a Mental Health Professional (MHP) who is the facilitator of the group and who monitors the more subjective and rational or irrational behavior of the principals and maybe even the behavior or stubbornness of the other professionals.  They form a strong bond and they are able to speak frankly to each other, again, unlike the red tape you need to maneuver around in Court.

 

All the Collaborative Family Law Professionals that I have met are super people who want to find a better way for families to get through marital transition.  It’s not easy when people are under such stress.  We try to get them to look forward so that when they look back ten years down the road they'll be sure they did the best thing their your family. Most of the people working in litigation of a marital break-up are wonderful and super competent professionals.  There is room for both.

 

I really do enjoy working on difficult litigated cases and I was brought into cases often when a neutral was not being open-minded and fair.  It’s a tremendous challenge and there is a great deal of personal satisfaction that I get from making my opinions known and winning logic battles.  Each one is a story in itself.  However, is that the best thing for a husband and wife going through one of the most difficult times of their lives?  Not necessarily but sometimes it just goes that way. 

 

Some married people want to beat their spouses into the ground and spend and spend on fees for their own satisfaction regardless what it does to the family and how little it saves, when good people are one both sides.  I think that with a good group of trained Collaborative Professionals, that rough water can be sailed much easier without their giving up what is their right to have. 

 

What Litigation will do and Collaborative Law will not do is make new law and set new precedents because Collaborative is all accomplished away from the public and the results are not reported. That can be a good thing.  There are things that judges cannot do because of the rigidity of the system, that the group can do.  Yet there are clients who will stubbornly fight logic and not even trust his or her lawyer and will fight until the Court renders an opinion.  Judges today are overburdened with huge case loads and easing their burden will give them more time to devote to the cases where they are needed most.  Do Collaborative Engagements fail?  Not often but sure they can go bad.  However, I can tell you over the years I have been through many litigated cases where the parties have changed attorneys and forensic accountants and mental health professionals many times, each time causing more huge fees for starting over and over again and relearning all the events and issues. 

 

To be fair and forthcoming, in 2004, I wrote an article that appeared in the NY Law Journal entitled “Problems With Neutrals In Contentious Divorces.”  Yet, now I am presenting this Collaborative Law alternative, where a neutral forensic accountant is an integral part of the team.  But the operative word there is TEAM.  The communication that goes on among the team is not something you always find in litigated cases with neutrals.  Too often, the neutrals keep their distance from both sides and do their work without communication with the attorneys or they'll have too much communication with the professionals representing the propertied spouse only, leaving the non-propertied spouse at a huge disadvantage.  Then when they get to Court and the neutral forensic accountant states what he or she did, it’s too late to go back and have them redo it all. And sometimes they are even too arrogant to do that, especially if appointed by the Court.  I have seen some real "characters" as neutrals.  With the Collaborative Group, communication is the foundation and that is not something that happens only at the end, after all the field work is done, it happens at each meeting, and outside of meetings, where the other professionals have a chance to point out things that the Neutral Financial Professional could be missing and visa versa.  Again, that is done by talking, not with expensive motions.