Do you have to be engaged to be married to enter into prenup? To enter into prenuptial agreement, do you have to be engaged to be married? If jurisdiction matters, USA.
Well, it is hard to prove a negative, but the answer seems to be: No, you do not need to be engaged. For example, the article Prenuptial Agreements in the United States from the International Academy of Family Lawyers tries to give "an overview of this rather complex area of American family law and estate planning", yet contains not mention of engagement at all. If being engaged were relevant, it would likely be mentioned. Similarly, the "Frequently Asked Questions about Premarital Agreements" on lawhelp.org do not mention engagement. Also see Does being engaged (to be married) carry any legal significance? for information on where being engaged does or does not matter legally.
The legal solution is very simple. Under Philippine law (Title 1, Marriage, Article 2) No marriage shall be valid, unless these essential requisites are present: (1) Legal capacity of the contracting parties who must be a male and a female; and (2) Consent freely given in the presence of the solemnizing officer. If you do not consent to the marriage during the ceremony, that is the end of the matter, you are not married. You can also refuse to apply for a license under article 11 (which requires your sworn application – refuse to swear). If your are threatened with violence, you can report this threat to the police, since not even your father is allowed to threaten to assault or kill you.
You need to be very clear with B that you intend to continue to operate A. You need to be clear whether you are to be an actual employee of B, or a hired contractor for B. If an employee, you need to agree with B how much time you can devote to A while employed by B, or to put it another way, how much time (per day, week or whatever) you are expected to devote to B before doing stuff for A. Are there to be restrictions, such as a ban on your doing things for A while at B's worksite? Above all, you need to agree on who owns what rights to both the existing A code, and any new code will be held by you, and what rights will be held by B. All the above should be in a written agreement, and you would be wise to have a lawyer draft or at least review the language. If B will not agree to this, you will have a choice to make: put A on hold while working for B, or not accept B's offer. Do not lie to B about what you are doing with A. Oh, and if you had any sort of non-compete agreement at the job you quit four months ago (let's call them C) be sure that you comply with it, or are prepared to fight it. If there is any question, this is another area where you would do well to consult a lawyer. Many non-compete agreements claim more than local law allows, and are not enforceable. Many others are very much enforceable. It depends on the wording of the agreement, and the provisions of the law where you are located. Also, do not use any confidential data from C without C's written permission.
No. An engagement letter is a written confirmation that you have hired a lawyer which also sets forth the contractual obligations of the parties (i.e. the basis upon which attorneys' fees will be charged in the case). Instead of serving as an "estimate" or "approximate quote" of the fees to be charged, it is evidence that there is an attorney-client relationship and it sets forth the contractual terms of that relationship. Unless the engagement letter is for a fixed fee (which is uncommon but not unheard of), it only sets forth a method for determining what legal fees are owed and does not predict in advance what those fees will be. An engagement letter often does set forth a "retainer" amount that must be paid when the lawyer is hired, but a "retainer" is more akin to a security deposit on a lease than an estimate of what the total charges for the representation will be. Lawyers are required as a matter of professional ethics to put these things in writing. Of course, it wouldn't be improper for an engagement letter to include an estimate of the fees that will be charged in a representation as well as the other matters described above. But, that would be rather unusual. Firstly, since these people didn't even type my mobile number correctly, I'm uneasy about them drafting a legal agreement for me, where I wanted each and every clause to be thoroughly checked. I'm not confident of them being thorough. This certainly doesn't make a great first impression, although it reflects more on the quality of the office staff than on the legal acumen of the lawyers. I wouldn't blow a simple typo in writing a phone number out of proportion. How do I tell them that I do not need their services? Advise them by telephone, or better yet by letter, email or text, that you have decided not to retain their services. Does their sending of an engagement letter mean that I pay them for their time of drafting the letter? The firm probably could charge you, but it is customary not to charge for drafting an engagement letter. I wasn't expecting an engagement letter. I was expecting something like an ordinary email which said something like "this is our approximate hourly fee". Lawyers, as you might expect from their line of work, need to be more formal as a result of their legal ethics requirements, so this is very normal. The engagement letter constitutes a contract between the parties if the engagement is commenced. An informal communication, followed by a formal one, could lead to confusion over which one applies and could lead to mistakes where someone given an informal communication never received the required formal engagement letter. their hourly fees (which does not look reasonable to me) Lawyers are expensive, and good lawyers are worth it. The supply and demand issues are particularly intense in India because there are fewer lawyers there capita than in many other countries.
The idea is that, by default, we should assume the payment is a gift, unless we have specific evidence to suggest that it is offered in exchange for something. In the first case, the father-in-law has given no indication as to why he is giving her the money. It could be that he is indifferent to whether she remarries or not, and simply wants her to have a steady income in either case. He may be presuming that, if she remarries, her new husband will be able to provide for her, but until such time, he (the father-in-law) will pay her way. We certainly do not have evidence to show that he actually wants her to stay unmarried and is paying her for that purpose. In the second case, the father-in-law has given us more evidence. His words make it explicit that he does want her not to remarry, and that he is paying her in order to get her not to. Since he is clearly paying money with the intention of getting another party to do something (or in this case, to refrain from doing something), we understand it as a contract.
&quot;become yours&quot; - Which court are you in? The court of the schoolyard? If you're in real court, then You would need to sue, to quiet title When a bona-fide dispute as to ownership exists, a case can be brought before a judge to resolve ownership definitively. The axiom of a quiet title action is that you must notify all parties who could possibly have an interest. Really, notification is 7/8 of it, because by the time you arrive at a &quot;quiet title&quot; action, most likely they either lost interest or are gone. And the crux of &quot;Notify&quot; is that your efforts to notify the party are to the standards of the court. You are a hostile party, noting your interests are in conflict with theirs. (we must fairly assume they want their iPad back; you want to take the iPad). Thus, it is obvious you will prefer to fail in your efforts at contact, and you will do a bad job of it, possibly on purpose. Since parties in a lawsuit are responsible to serve all documents on each other, courts have very high standards for that. And these standards are tested and gamed all the time. I even had a clever plaintiff do it to me! (we were expecting both the appeal and the dis-service). The crux of document service is you hire a licensed, third-party independent process server. A process server is naturally good at skip-tracing (think &quot;Dog: the Process Server&quot;) and is accustomed to finding people who are actively hiding. (because some people think they can avoid consequences by evading service. That's a loser's game generally.) So, when you show up in court and they aren't there, the judge will ask &quot;did you serve them?&quot; And then you say &quot;yes&quot;, name the company, and if needed call the process server to the stand, and the server reads out of their notebook all the things they did to search for the counterparty.
It primarily depends on the title that you have to the house: are you &quot;joint tenants with right of survivorship&quot;. This could have happened when you bought the house; it also could have been done after the fact in various ways. In that case, the house is outside of your wife's estate (which, under the circumstances, is divided between children and you). The lender might be confused about the status of the property, but they might be right, so the question is, what is your legal &quot;interest&quot; in the house, that is, does the title document say &quot;tenants in common&quot;? Assuming that the property is not recorded as JTWROS, then there are two matters to attend to. First, the lender may need to be satisfied, somehow, that they aren't taking a risk by refinancing when you aren't really the full owner. The second is clarifying actual ownership. Estates Code 201.0002-.003 govern intestate succession with a surviving spouse, where the dividing question is whether it is a community estate or not, which then implies shares for children. In that case, the children are part-owners, so you need their consent to e.g. sell the house (that is, this is a complication that needs to be fixed). Basically, you have to get a lawyer, and straighten this out.
What factors might a court consider in these circumstances? Is it true that anyone can just walk up and file a document in any case, with no requirement to identify themselves? If nobody admits to filing a document, it is likely that the court would grant a motion to strike the document and disregard it (revising a past ruling if the issue was raised within the six months allowed for reconsidering rulings under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) or the state equivalent). A court document must, on its face, indicate a filing person and be signed to be accepted by the clerk of the court pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 or the state equivalent. But, if the document appears on its face to be legitimate, the person filing it will not generally be required to prove their identity. This happens even less often now than it used to (in the past, fake filings were often made by members of "sovereign citizens" movements to harass governmental officials), because in both the state courts were I practice and in federal court, documents must usually be filed with the court by lawyers via e-filing using a password protected e-filing account. Usually, only parties without lawyers and out of state lawyers who are still in the process of setting up their e-filing account file court documents in person. When documents are filed in person, they are also often delivered via courier rather than by the person who actually signed the documents. And, as a matter of practical reality, third-parties almost never file fake documents in court (in part, because there is usually someone present who is in a position to call attention to the fraud to the court). Still, this can happen, although it is very rare. I've only seen a situation like this come up once in twenty years of practice. (My account below oversimplifies some of the technical details of what happened to get to the gist of the points relevant to this question.) In that case, a lawyer was representing an ex-husband in a post-decree alimony modification case that had been appealed filed a bill of costs that she sought to recover on behalf of her client for the appeal, but she filed it in the wrong court (she filed it in the appellate court where she had represented her client, rather than, as required, in the trial court where another attorney had represented the ex-husband). When an order awarding him costs was not entered by any court, the ex-husband filed an (untimely) bill of costs in the trial court under his appellate lawyer's name using the appellate filing as a model, without her consent, by forging her name on the document. The lawyer didn't discover this (because she was retained only in the appeal and had never entered an appearance in the trial court and thus didn't have access to the trial court file, and because the court doesn't automatically send you a copy of your own filings) until I responded on behalf of the ex-wife to the forged bill of costs alleging that it was untimely which I served a copy of upon the ex-husband's lawyer as required by the rules. At that point, the ex-husband's lawyer immediately called me and the court to explain that she did not file this document and that it was forged (otherwise should could have been sanctioned for knowingly filing the bill of costs knowing that it was out of time and was frivolous at that point and could have been deemed to be responsible for further trial court proceedings of the ex-husband in the case, like keeping him appraised of deadlines, court rulings and filings by other lawyers in the case, since it appeared that she'd participated in the trial court case). Ultimately, the court declined to award the costs because they were filed in an untimely manner and because they were not really filed by the lawyer as claimed. So, the the court disregarded the bill of costs and denied this relief to the ex-husband. (If I was the judge, I would have hauled the ex-husband into court and held him in contempt of court sua sponte, but in this very busy court where hearings in divorcees are often scheduled two or more years out from the scheduling date, the judge didn't have the time to devote to issues like that.)