A case that I'm particularly proud of is actually that we settled at mediation not all that long ago. I'm going to call my client 'Kim'. We'll call her Kim. Kim and her husband had built up a business from scratch, right after they got married. And built it up towards producing several hundred thousand dollars a year in income to the household, which is pretty substantial considering they really only started the business about three years ago. So, that's back in 2013. 2012-2013 is when they started this. And the big overriding issue in the case of course was the business, what's going to happen to it? And ultimately, my client Kim wasn't interested in continuing to work with the business. She had decided that she wanted to leave Georgia because of some family members that she has out of state.
So she wasn't interested in maintaining and interested in the business but she did want to have the fact that she had to spend a considerable amount of time and energy building what is now a very lucrative business and to make sure that she was going to be able to get what was fair on-- through the divorce process and making sure that that she wasn't short-changed for her efforts in building this tremendous business.
We went to mediation and of course we had an expert and I had prepared with our expert for the mediation gone through, had all of our valuations and everything like that in hand but we like to not to have our expert come with us to the mediation just because-- frankly, at a mediation, you don't want to have too many cooks, too many chiefs, and not enough Indians can lead to problems that don't need to be problems.
So we elected, in our case not to have her come with us. But for some reason though, they decided to have their expert come with them. So, they brought their forensic accountant and we were discussing the valuations of the business and we had decided that we're going to let our clients go and do, have a little free time and the attorneys and this particular expert in the mediate, we were all going to sit down and go over things.
And through that process, even though I didn't have my expert sitting with me, just having gone and prepared with her, more importantly, having a financial background and being able to understand that, we were able to go through that process and just pick a part all the things that they had done to try and reduce the value of the business so that way Kim's husband would get out of it by paying her far, far less than what she was really entitled to after everything was said and done.
And we were able to do that for our client because we have a strong financial background and that's what we do. So by having that knowledge and being able to apply it in a situation, an important situation, we not only were able to help get the other side to understand, we knew what they were doing it and why it was they weren't going to be able to do it. And probably, most importantly is letting them know that we know how to counter that if that's what you try to provide at trial. That allowed us to bring the parties together to a valuation that was fair to everybody. We were able to settle that case that day.
So that's one story that I'm particularly proud of.
