Consent order

[Kaleidoscope101]

My ex and I are in the process of divorcing and need to get a consent order. Are we able to draft this ourselves rather than going through Solicitors?
We are amicable and have agreed all finances (matrimonial home has already been sold and shared out) so the consent order will just be the official/legal agreement.

I want to keep costs down and don't see the point of spending lots going back and forwards with solicitors when we both agree.

Any advice please

I’d say no not really. There is still some technical stuff in it - certain claims being dismissed etc. You can however find an online law service and get a fixed fee if you have agreed heads of terms between you.
Have you filled out your D81?

Yes, have both completed the D81

It's a legal document so best to get it done properly. It doesn't need to cost much.

I'm about to do the same thing and have been looking at online divorce services who will draw up a clean break consent order for a fixed fee from £259 To £499. Easy Online, Divorce Online and Wikivorce all offer this service at a fraction of the cost of a high street solicitor. All have good reviews on Trustpilot.

The problem I think is that it needs to be fair.
Even if you do it yourselves/limited solicitors, I think it needs to be signed off by a judge.
So, if it's not fair, they might say no which will end up costing you more.
I think.

we are going to try Wikivorce. I will try to return here to update my customer review. My friend was nice enough to send her draft C.O. over which I would have largely cloned, but it didn't cover Mesher Order: we Gave up on DIY because we wanted a Mesher Order & that seems to require specific phrasing. The situation is very frustrating, why do we need to pay £260 when we are & were amicable & we know the division is fair? There seems to be no guidance online, no "Amicable divorce for dummies" textbook.

No, you can draft it well into layman’s terms, but you really need a solicitor to put it into legal lanaguage formal draft that the court can seal.
pin truth this doesn’t need to cost very much at all- my solicitor charged for about 2 hours work for the entire consent order business which included gathering signatures and uploading at right time onto court portal.
Pat the time (2021), petitioners could not access the court divorce documents once petition accepted as decree nisi (as was called back then), you simply couldn’t do it. Instead people posted them by mail and, if you read on here, they then got lost or went into a black hole. I decided to get solicitor to do it so she could upload directly and not rely on snail mail. I don’t know if that’s still true- but do check this

there is also another benefit. Your solicitor drawing this up as petioner (or one of petitioners) shows the court you’ve taken Legal advice. In our case we also paid for 1 hour for my ex to have a solicitor talk through legal implications with him. Neither of us needed it, but we felt it was worth paying so that courts would know we’d BOTH had even a small amount of legal advice. Courts can question or even , eventually, refuse to seal , a consent order if either “fair settlement” is not achieved or one person could be considered vulnerable. We just didn’t want to add any extra risk to not involve any proof of a legal conversation to ensure we both understood consequences to the court.

Our whole legal bill for this consent order piece was £600 inc VAT . We got our decree final and consent order signed within 4 months of me raising a petition. Ok, can’t do this now I know , but shows it doesn’t have to cost a fortune and it all helps to smooth paths quickly and less stressfully

well done you both for keeping it amicable. Have you accessed the ADVICE NOW site ? If not I’d recommend it to just run through your consent order and ensure it meets fair settlement and forms filled out correctly

@peanutbutterkid - how did things go with wikivorce?

Ah,. well, basically wikiV is just a portal to get to a solicitor willing to do some of the work for a fixed price.

They were inefficient, kept mispelling things, kept saying things like "don't bother us about next steps until 2 weeks have passed" and I'd enquire at 2.5 weeks and they;d finally do that next step.

The actual paragraph they inserted about mesher order was so simple, I could copy & paste it here. We could have done all the paperwork without the solicitor and finished divorcing MONTHS earlier if we had that Mesher Order paragraph.

So er, we got there. But very slow! I was confused about the sequence of steps the whole way thru, though. We had delays because I didn't understand "what to do next" sometimes.