Attorney Daniel Stock – HIGH-ASSET DIVORCE CASES
Experienced Family Lawyer
If you are a high-net-worth individual, or the spouse of one, and seeking a divorce, you may want to consider consulting Daniel Stock, one of New York’s most respected matrimonial lawyers. His specialty is “high-asset” divorce cases. This may sound counterintuitive—you’d imagine that all highly experienced family lawyers want to represent wealthy clients who can pay big fees, which for a high-asset divorce start at around $100,000 per lawyer and go up from there. But this is, in fact, a specialized area of matrimonial law.
Complex, High-Conflict, Ongoing Divorces
High-net-worth divorce cases are also usually high-conflict and highly complex, often taking years to litigate. “A lot of lawyers, strangely enough, do not like high-conflict cases,” Mr. Stock explains. In such cases a husband and wife cannot agree on virtually any significant decisions regarding their divorce, from how much the house is worth to what private school the children attend to what the children should eat for breakfast. “I have a case now where one parent accused the other of feeding a two-year-old child too much sugar,” Stock says.
Hotly contested custody battles in high-asset divorce cases present additional complexities that make this area of law challenging for the average family law attorney. “These cases typi¬cally go on for years. One or both parties have the money for legal fees, and they tend to take entrenched positions.”
Neither parent wants to lose custody of their children, and those who can afford to do so are willing to mount all kinds of trials. People try to hide assets, claim dubious tax deductions, or give away artworks, thereby reducing the value of marital assets. These require hiring forensic accountants to comb through voluminous paperwork, or art appraisers. Other experts may be called in if there are accusations of drug or alcohol abuse. “Trials are very expensive; they involve witnesses and evidence and people’s time. Those cases can get quite involved,” says Stock.
Thrives on Complexity
Stock thrives on such complexity. “You have a lot of number crunching going on, which I find personally very interesting.” He enjoys the strategy aspect of pulling together a diverse group of professionals to build a case.
Very skillful lawyers, he explains, need to have multiple skills; they need to be very good at talking persuasively in court, at writing, and at being very aggressive, when necessary, in order to win cases.
“As the cases get more complicated and more high-net-worth, there are more moving parts, and to me, that’s more interesting. So that’s what I’ve gravitated toward.”
Record Ulster County Settlement
Over the last 24 years, Stock has built up his practice specializing in high-net-worth divorce cases. More than a decade ago he settled what was then the largest contested matrimonial case in
Ulster County. “The amount of the marital assets by the time I finished litigating the case was $31 million, which was a lot for upstate New York at the time,” Stock says. “I was asking colleagues there how they thought the judge would react to certain things, and they were telling me, ‘Dan, we’ve never seen a case like this. You’re on your own.’”
Wall Street Background Serves Clients
After graduating from Pace Law School, Stock worked as a securities lawyer on Wall Street, which he soon found to be tedious. However, the exposure to the financial industry proved valuable, and he took a detour into the banking arena, working as an assistant vice president at Bank of New York for several years.
Itching to return to practicing law after a while, Stock decided on family law, starting at the bottom as a law guardian in family court, providing legal aid to people who don’t have the income to retain private counsel.
It wasn’t long before he graduated to private, paid, litigated divorce cases involving custody and child support. “From that point on, it was pretty much a short step to taking on higher and higher net worth cases.”
Pro Bono Activities
Stock is active in a number of organizations offering pro bono legal services, including the New York Women’s Bar Association Pro Bono Matrimonial Law Project, the New York County Supreme Court Matrimonial Neutral Evaluators, and the Hudson Valley Collaborative Divorce & Dispute Resolution Association.
As one of two attorney members of the Coalition for Family Justice, Stock devotes one Sunday per month offering free legal advice, guidance, and strategy to lower-income women who don’t have the money to hire divorce lawyers.
Yankees fan
Bronx-born Stock is a lifelong Yankees fan and holds season tickets, and more recently, he became a Rangers fan. An amateur guitarist, he plays blues and electric guitar with a garage band in Connecticut.
