Question: My husband is a physician, and we have not lived as “man and wife” for more than 20 of our 33 years of marriage. This suited me just fine until I was called by a nurse whom he had fired (and with whom he had been sleeping for five years) who told me that he was putting his (our) assets into foreign trusts to “protect them from medical malpractice suits.” While my husband always had a phobia about being sued for medical malpractice, he has never been sued, and I got the distinct feeling that he was getting ready to divorce me and hide the assets.

She gave me an unsigned copy of a trust that she had taken out of the trash, and I took it to a lawyer for an opinion. He told me that it appeared that my husband had placed most of his (our) assets – investment accounts, rental property such as his office building, etc. -- into limited partnerships that, in turn, were transferred into this foreign trust of which a bank in the foreign country was the trustee. Although I was a beneficiary (along with him and our two grown children), if he and I divorced, I would lose everything from the trust.

I hired a divorce lawyer to sue him before it was too late, but after several months of legal mumbo jumbo, I find that I may have been too late and that I will probably have to sue the trust in this foreign country. I don’t understand why I have to go through all of this, and would appreciate an email from you if you can help me understand what my lawyer has not.

Answer: While most of our readers are not married to wealthy physicians who try to tuck away family assets in trusts for “asset protection,” these types of issues are becoming more prevalent in today’s society.

While forming partnerships and trusts may be legitimate efforts to avoid civil liability as your husband asserts, a byproduct may also be an attempt to avoid equitable distribution. Certainly, the trust provisions that you would get your share unless there was a divorce is -- to say the least -- a telling example of your husband’s intentions.

That said, while you may have a cause of action to set aside this trust, the court in your state may not have jurisdiction over the contents of the foreign trust to allow your lawsuit to take place in your home state. In other words, because the trust is irrevocable, even though there is jurisdiction over your husband, he is not the trustee and there is no jurisdiction over the content of the trust. This means that although your equitable share of your assets may be in the trust, and although your state courts may grant you an entitlement to your equitable share of the assets, to collect, you may well have to bring a lawsuit against your husband and the foreign trustee in the country where the trust was formed.

SoloFact: Had the trust been “revocable” rather than “irrevocable,” your husband would have had substantial control, meaning that your state court could find that the transaction was misleading and therefore, not valid.