Reply to What is Just Compensation for a "Life Lost"?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The story of George and Annie (totally fictional).

George is a Vienna boy who attends Virginia Tech, where he earns his BS, MS and PhD in ChE.  Annie is a San Francisco girl who earns in BA in Philosophy at Yale.  They both meet at Harvard, while she is earning her JD and he is earning his MBA.

After Harvard, she clerks on the Fourth Circuit and he begins his career for Mobil.  She goes on to join him in the DC area a year later, in 1981, where she is clerking on the Supreme Court.  They get married the summer after her clerkship, and she begins work that fall for Skadden in the practice area of Mergers and Acquisitions.

They spend the next nine years enjoying life as a high-earning, no-children, career-focused, fun-loving couple.  Annie's and George's career are going very well, and they travel all over the world as vacations permit.  In her ninth year at the law firm now, Annie has been assured through reviews that she is on the track to make partner in M&A in the next year or two at most.  Then George comes home one day, in 1990, to tell Annie that he has been offered a two-year job posting in Abu Dhabi which will surely lead to the executive ranks in Development.

Annie considers this, talks to friends, family, and colleagues, and is reassured that a two-year break, after which they will return to DC, should not postpone her partnership opportunities too much -- besides it is a good time to start the family they had always planned.

Two years in the UAE turns into three which is then unexpectedly (but why derail George's momentum now?) followed by three years in Nigeria, and now the family has two children - a boy and a girl - both under the age of six.  It is now 1996, and George turns down another promotion opportunity in Papua New Guinea to finally return to DC.  On the eve of their return, though, another company - Exxon - with whom George has worked, offers him a deputy vice-president position in Development, which pays much more, but is in Houston.  George and Annie decide to move to Houston, where two children soon become three.

Three years later, in 1999, Exxon and Mobil merge, and George is recalled to Virginia, where his star continues to rise.  Annie takes care of the logistics of their move, and as she thinks about where the family should live and where the children will go to school, she contemplates a return to work.  Full-time, partnership at Skadden is not eventually out of the question as they want her back, but will be difficult to attain in the near-future as she has not done any M&A work - or indeed any legal work - for the past nine years.  Annie settles the family in McLean, gets the two older children into Sidwell, and stays home with the two-year old as she works on hiring a nanny and finding a job.

In 2000, Annie finds in-house work at a relatively new corporation, Capital One, which conveniently is located near their home.  However, that first year back at work is not easy, one nanny leaves and then another, and their little girl is having constant infections, ear, sinuses, pneumonia, which require constant doctors appointments.  George, obviously, cannot or does not want to take the time off of work for these, and in any case he is constantly traveling internationally.

Annie finds it increasingly stressful to maintain her legal schedule responsibly at a company that is growing by leaps and bounds while having to pick up the older children from afterschool programs at 6:00 p.m. (when the nanny is making dinner) and take time from her schedule for school meetings, doctor's appointments.  However, with the help of an accommodating employer and later a part time schedule, she manages to balance everything for the next year-and-a-half.

In late 2001 George is sent to London, and the family follows.  More relocation, more finding schools, more transfers in an increasingly tense world.  Every time Annie is left to contemplate and coordinate the logistics, help execute the seamless transfer and adjust the children to a great new life in their next stop.

It is now 2014, the three children are off and well at Stanford and Virginia Tech as they launch their own careers, and the youngest daughter is about to start at Yale.  George is now Vice President at another global oil company and extremely well-situated and compensated.

In truth, Annie and George have been growing apart for some time now, and she is ready to return to the States and assume to semblance of a more-normal life closer to the children.  George needs to remain abroad for his career, and they amicably decide to divorce at this point after a long, and relatively good marriage.

George any Annie have been married 33 years, since 1981.  She has been out of legal practice, except for her brief, year-and-a-half long stint at Capital One, back in 2000-2001, for almost twenty-four years.

Annie is now a 60-year old, unemployed attorney.  George is now a senior vice president of an international oil company earning upwards of $5 million/year.  If she takes the next 33 years to try to build up her career, as Goerge took to build up his, she will be almost 90 before she reaches her full earning potential, and that is clearly not going to happen at her age for many reasons.

I hope that this completely fabricated example helps to illustrate why a spouse is often compensated for a lifetime career loss.[/quote]

No, this illustrates that, despite all her legal education, Annie forgot to protect herself.  If she wanted to quit her job and count on his security, she should have made him sign a post-nup.  Over and over again, she made the decision to curtail her carreer.  It was her choice, and she made it poorly.[/quote]

+1 - She should get her half of the assets and the retirement accounts. And perhaps due to her age should be awarded some spousal support. But I'd say that Annie, as a lawyer, should have known better than anyone that she needed to protect herself better than she did.

And maybe further back, when Annie was still younger and sensed her marriage falling apart, she should have begun planning for what she was going to do if this marriage ended.

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