At the top of this board is a link to ADVICE NOW .
they have brilliant guides on how to get your financial agreeement “Diy” whether through mediation, courts or hopefully consent order.
they explain how to complete the legal financial declarations (D81 and form E) and how “fair settlement” works- contrary to popular belief on this board settlment do NOT start at 50:50, the court likes it if they do end up that way, but fair setup,ent criteria have to come first in law, and even for a consent order a court can refuse to “seal” it if they haven’t been met and send you away to rethink- a costly mistake
these guides explain each step in process and explain which individual tasks you should use a solicitor for , where you might and where yo7vrwally don’t need one . And there’s a list of solicitors who will work on just the tasks you need.
I shared these documents with my ex so we could both read up, understand the process, set our expectations right about how financial settlement would leave us both etc. it was hard reading and then accepting we would both loose financially on divorce so so,etc,we needs time to come to terms with
we used a solicitor for just the legal “drafting” of our agreed and layman document we drew up for consent order. We then paid for that solicitor to submit that and D81 to court (we did all our form E and D81 ourselves) and then paid for solicitors to give us final advice over what we were signing in terms of consent order - 45 mins for both, so we could show courts we’d both had legal advice as ours wasn’t quite 50:50
You do NOT need a solicitor to file your petition at all. I’m actually,appalled she told you this. The government has worked hard at making the petition easy, accessible and non adversarial. Anyone can do it. It takes about 30 mins if you have all your documents ready. Seriously that’s outrageous given solicitors charge £200+ per hour - she’d probably have to charge you 2 hours as she’d have to get all information from you and you’d pay for that. And then you’d be paying for her to contact your stbex- bloody outrageous and wouldn’t trust her to do anything frankly.
again ADVICE NOW has guide on the petition process, but really the government web site is really really straightforward with easy to read guides. Just make sure you tick the box saying you want the court to make your financial agreement - I found that the only ambiguity as we were going consent route - but in that case you are really just saying you want court to “seal” it (eg make it legal)
i divorced in 2021, before law changes but forms and process for consent orders haven’t changed . It cost US in total (we agree to share costs) £1400 including court costs . It took us less than 14 weeks to divorce form petition raised to final decrees (though you can’t do it that quick now) because we were under same roof, keeping it amicable (though it was very hard), and both agreed we wanted to avoid costs and stress . I think we had a very
“ easy” divorce process. The moving house was an entirely catastrophic and horrendous process mind 😱🤣🤣
MEDIATE also has good guides , but I found ADVICE NOW way better. There’s a poster n here that often posts about another set of help guides- she may be along soon to signpost you to those.