25/07/2026
When the harder-to-value asset lands on your side of the table
A Court of Appeal decision handed down this week is getting attention in family law circles, and while the numbers involved are eye-watering, the principle behind it applies just as much to a modest divorce as it does to a multi-million pound one.
The case, briefly
A husband and wife had built up wealth over a forty-year marriage. Most of it was straightforward and could be split like cash. But a large chunk of it wasn't cash at all. It was a shareholding in a private company, worth an estimated nineteen million pounds on paper, but genuinely hard to sell, hard to value with certainty, and years away from being turned into anything either of them could actually spend.
The trial judge decided the wife should get thirty percent of that shareholding and the husband seventy percent. The reasoning was that sharing a risky asset like this should be treated as a last resort, and kept to a minimum whenever possible.
The Court of Appeal overturned that. It said there's no such rule. Fairness is the only principle that matters, and fairness has to run in both directions. If a court decides that an asset is genuinely uncertain, hard to sell, or hard to rely on, then both people should be expected to share that uncertainty, not just one of them because it happens to be more convenient or tidier for the case to work out that way. The split was changed to fifty-fifty.
Why this matters even if your case isn't worth millions
It's easy to read a judgment like this and assume it has nothing to do with you. Most divorces don't involve private companies worth nineteen million pounds. But the underlying question the court was wrestling with shows up constantly in far more modest cases, just in a smaller and more familiar form.
Think about a small business one of you runs, where nobody quite knows what it's really worth or when, if ever, it could be sold. Think about shares or an investment that can't easily be turned into cash. Think about a car still being paid off, where the "value" on paper isn't the same as what you'd actually get for it tomorrow.
In situations like these, someone often ends up being asked to accept the asset that's harder to pin down, while the other person walks away with the tidy, reliable, spendable share. Sometimes that's presented as simply how things are done, or as the sensible way to keep things simple. This judgment is a reminder that convenience isn't the same as fairness. If an asset carries real uncertainty, both people can reasonably expect to share in that uncertainty, rather than one person quietly absorbing all of it because it made the paperwork easier.
The takeaway
You don't need a fortune for this principle to apply to you. If you're being asked to accept the harder, less certain, less reliable side of a financial split, that's worth a genuine conversation rather than quiet acceptance. Fairness isn't just about splitting numbers down the middle. It's about making sure that whatever uncertainty exists in a case is carried by both people, not handed to whoever was in the weaker position to argue about it.
