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I get this question a lot with respect to prenups, both in an American and a Thai context. I have a Thai counterpart here in the office that assists, she will oftentimes assist in drafting up Thai prenups but there is this kind of notion "well can it be ironclad?" It is like well sort of in the sense that you can do everything you need to do to formalize it correctly and you can operate in such a way when dealing with the prenup that everybody understands where they are at and everybody understands what they are giving up if anything and what their rights and benefits are under the marital arrangement in the event of a possible future dissolution.

There's kind of these misnomers about prenups I find in sort of the popular culture out there, in movies etc. I think one of them was "Intolerable Cruelty". I think George Clooney was in that movie where there was this notion that once you just sign this prenup it's ironclad, there's nothing to, Well NO. The adjudicatory system is what it is. It's there for some third party to adjudicate. Now if you sign an agreement, if a person signs an agreement in good faith, with their faculties, without any duress then if they agreed to something it's generally going to be upheld. But I often think in sort of a pop cultural context this is kind of viewed as like, I won't call it chicanery but it's sort of like "Well if I can get someone to just sort of sign it, all is well. I don't ever have to worry about it again." To some extent that is true but there is no element of trickery going on with respect to a prenup. A prenup in fact you need to go out of your way to be as transparent as possible when dealing with the formalities associated with a prenuptial agreement because all parties need to understand what they are signing on to, what they are entitled to, what they are not entitled to, what they would be entitled to, what they will not now be entitled to or may be entitled to under certain limited conditions under the terms of the prenup.

Long story short, it is not some magical document; it is a legal document; it has certain specific types of formalities that may need to be adhered to, and I am strictly talking under either the context of Thai or American Law, there may be circumstances where it is not overly beneficial to either party to have a prenup depending on circumstances. So again it is all going to be very dependent on the given facts in the case but some notion that it is some kind of magical ironclad document, that is not quite what exactly it is.