Martin Vermaak Attorneys has used the opening of the South African spring wedding season to draw attention to a part of its practice that attracts far less notice than divorce litigation, namely the antenuptial contract and the matrimonial property regime that sits behind every marriage in this country. The Bryanston-based firm has worked in divorce and family law for over two decades, and the same team that handles contested and uncontested matters also assists couples who are still planning a wedding, along with spouses who married years ago and want to look again at the arrangement that governs their estates.

The reasoning behind the emphasis is a practical one. A matrimonial property regime is settled once, usually in the weeks before a wedding, and it then shapes how assets, debts and estates are treated for the whole of the marriage and afterwards. Martin Vermaak Attorneys sets the options out in plain terms on its website, and its notarial service covers the execution side of an antenuptial contract, so a couple is not left to work through the formalities alone at a point when most of their attention is on the wedding itself.

The regimes South African couples choose between

The firm's published guidance covers marriage in community of property, marriage out of community of property with the accrual system, and marriage out of community of property without the accrual, together with the requirements that apply to customary marriages. Each is a different answer to the same question of how two estates relate to one another once a couple is married. The firm works with couples who want that difference explained to them before they sign anything, rather than explained to them years later when a dispute has already started.

That explanatory work is a natural fit for a practice better known for what happens at the other end of a marriage. The divorce attorneys at the firm spend their working lives on the consequences of decisions taken at the very start, and that vantage point informs how the practice talks to couples who are still at the beginning. It also explains why the firm keeps its antenuptial material in ordinary language rather than in the technical register that so often makes couples sign a document they have not really read.

Changing a regime after the wedding

Martin Vermaak Attorneys also assists married couples who want to amend the property system they married under, work the firm sets out on its site under the heading of how to change your matrimonial property regime after marriage. The firm describes this as a formal application rather than a private arrangement between the two spouses, and it handles the preparation and application work for clients who decide to go that route. Enquiries of this kind tend to come from couples whose circumstances have moved a long way from where they were on their wedding day, often because one spouse has started a business, taken on debt, or inherited.

The firm makes no promises about how any individual application will be dealt with, and it does not treat the change of a regime as a routine administrative step. What it offers is the experience of a practice that has been working in this area of law for more than twenty years and knows what the process asks of the people going through it.

Family law work runs alongside

Antenuptial and marital regime work is one strand in a broader family law practice. The family law lawyers at Martin Vermaak Attorneys handle child custody, parental rights and responsibilities, child relocation, child maintenance and spousal maintenance. The firm also represents clients in domestic violence matters, including protection order applications, an area where the pace of a matter is often set by circumstances entirely outside the client's control.

Estate planning sits within the same practice. The firm drafts wills, acts as executor, and administers deceased estates, and it treats antenuptial agreements as part of that planning picture rather than as an isolated pre-wedding errand. A marital property regime and a will speak to one another, and a practice that handles both is in a position to look at them together.

Divorce work across the full range

On the divorce side the firm handles uncontested matters, contested matters, high-net-worth divorces and international divorce. The divorce lawyers in the team work with clients whose matters range from a straightforward agreement between two people who have already settled everything, through to disputes involving trusts, businesses and assets in more than one country. The firm notes on its website that it cannot offer legal aid, which is stated openly so that anyone in that position knows where they stand before they make contact.

The firm has been careful in its public material not to present divorce as a single kind of experience. Some clients arrive with an agreement already in hand and need the process completed properly. Others arrive in the middle of a crisis with children involved and very little settled. The practice is structured to take both, and the antenuptial side of the work is offered in the same spirit, as something that is better understood early than argued about later.

Four offices and a wider consulting footprint

The head office is at The Station, 63 Peter Place, Bryanston, in Sandton. The firm also has offices in Pretoria at Regus, 3rd Floor Steven House, 570 Fehrsen Street, in Umhlanga at Spaces, 2 Ncondo Place, Ridgeside Drive, and in Cape Town at Cape Town Collective, 38 Wale Street. Beyond those four, private consultation rooms are available in Bedfordview, Centurion, Midrand, Roodepoort, Randburg, Braamfontein, Lynnwood Bridge, Westville, Stamford Hill, Ballito, Century City, Claremont and Bellville Park.

That spread matters for a national practice. Family matters do not respect provincial boundaries, and a couple marrying in Gauteng may well be living in KwaZulu-Natal or the Western Cape a few years later. Having family lawyers reachable in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town, with consulting rooms in a good many suburbs in between, means a client is not obliged to travel across the country for a conversation that could be had closer to home.

Why the timing matters this month

September is when the South African wedding calendar begins to fill for the warmer months ahead, and it is the point at which couples who plan to marry in the summer start dealing with the paperwork that has to be in place beforehand. An antenuptial contract belongs to that pre-wedding period rather than to the honeymoon, and the firm's view is that it deserves a proper conversation rather than a signature squeezed in between a venue deposit and a seating plan.

There is a second reason the timing is useful. The last quarter of the year is also when many households take stock of their financial position for the year that is closing, and questions about how a marriage treats property tend to surface in exactly that kind of review. Martin Vermaak Attorneys has structured its intake to accommodate both groups, the couples who are about to marry and the spouses who are reconsidering an arrangement that has been in place for years.

Making contact with the firm

The firm accepts enquiries by telephone, by WhatsApp, through the live chat on its website and through a callback request form, and its material describes the first callback as free and without obligation. Full details on the firm's divorce, family law, estate planning and notarial services can be found on the Martin Vermaak Attorneys website at https://www.martinvermaak.co.za/.

About Martin Vermaak Attorneys

Martin Vermaak Attorneys is a South African divorce and family law firm with more than two decades of experience. The practice handles contested, uncontested, high-net-worth and international divorce, child custody and parental rights and responsibilities, child relocation, child and spousal maintenance, domestic violence and protection orders, antenuptial agreements and changes to a matrimonial property regime, notarial services, and estate planning and administration. Its head office is in Bryanston, Sandton, with further offices in Pretoria, Umhlanga and Cape Town and consultation rooms in a number of other centres. The firm does not offer legal aid.

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Martin Vermaak Attorneys
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 087 822 1639
Website: https://www.martinvermaak.co.za/