While there are many roadblocks that can sour a seemingly collegial business breakup, there are ways to foster goodwill and pave the way for an amicable “business divorce.”

The steps are worth taking because realizing a relatively smooth divide can save all parties significant money and time, not to mention emotional wear and tear, according to Mathieu Shapiro, a Philadelphia-based managing partner at the Obermayer law firm who specializes in split-ups.

“Frequently the partners spend more time together than they do with their spouse and family and their primary relationship has to do with money, which is fraught in many ways,” Shapiro said. “So when it finally falls apart…it’s just like in a family divorce. You will have years and years of built up frustration, resentments and slights and each side is 100% convinced and wants to be vindicated on all of that history.”

Shapiro, who has typically worked through such breakups with small to medium-sized privately held family offices or professional firms with lawyers, doctors, accountants and family offices, said the Ernst & Young breakup which has been halted is significantly more complicated because it entails so many people and countries and is playing out on a very public stage. 

But he said the deal highlights some of the challenges that all firms with parties going their separate ways face. Here are three rules of thumb that he advises companies facing a breakup to consider: 

Avoid the fishbowl: Initially only include those people that are directly impacted by the split at the table for the hard and difficult discussions about how you want to divide assets, he said. While secrets are not good and you need to be open and honest about the breakup, you want to settle debates among the affected parties before other stakeholders such as employees and clients are brought into the conversation. 

It’s also best that negotiations be conducted privately, not in a fishbowl, Shapiro said.  

In an ideal world you want the employees to be presented with a cooperative and amicable plan where the partners can say they’ve, ‘happily agreed to do this and here’s how we want to take care of you,’ and by same token you want to be able to go to the clients and make clear how it will affect them, Shapiro said. “Even if the partners hate each other at that point, they’re always better off presenting to the world that they don’t and they’re doing it cooperatively,” he said. 

Map out the company’s structure: All parties need to put in the time to properly understand the structure of the legacy company and who owns what assets. While most companies are not as extraordinarily complicated as EY, even smaller companies can be deceptively complex. 

For example, in a family business different generations may have different sized interests in various holdings and in a partnership one partner may have two clients that produce a large share of the company’s revenue. Whether there’s a shared document or not, each side probably has its list of clients and list of fees over the last one to five years and they have in their minds a projection of future fees for the client and an idea in their head of where that client is going to go, Shapiro said. 

If it’s going to be an amicable split, the people not getting the clients in their split of the company would want to know what they are they getting for the value they contributed to the care and wellbeing of those clients over the years, he said. 

Make everyone a winner: Trying to divide assets and income streams and future obligations is a monumental task for any sized company. 

But the key challenge is to make sure that you divide the assets fairly. “Whenever you are trying to divide a company like this, trying to divide the assets, the business, the clients and obligations and everything that comes with it, if there is a perception of winners and losers in the division you’ve got a problem,” Shapiro said. On the other hand, “if you come up with a division that doesn’t create the perception of winners and losers then you deserve every penny of money they’re paying you,” he said.