Joint lawyer

[user1469796848]

Has anybody used a joint divorce lawyer (to act for both parties)? Interested in experiences. I'd like to save costs, make the process quicker and most importantly make things more amicable / less adversarial. Wondering if this is a good approach...

You can't do that - how would the joint solicitor be able to offer appropriate and unbiased advice to each party if they're also representing the other one?

In fact if you discuss any information relating to the divorce to any local solicitor the other party can't then go on and engage them as it's a conflict of interest.

You can't do that they won't allow it

They won’t do it. They make sure that they don’t already represent the other party before they will Speak to you.

You can use a resolution lawyer who use a much more consultative approach rather than a confrontational one, which might be good for you

ir you can do bulk of the things yourselves if you are pretty amicable . We didn’t t use any really but knew about finances etc and came to a fair split which made it much easier

Since the introduction of no fault divorces, you can instruct a joint lawyer. There are a number of companies offering this service. we've just started this exact process. We are amicably (mostly) splitting and want to do it as close to 50:50 as possible but our finances are complicated and so we felt this was the best way forward to get to an agreement. Our children are adults and a 50:50 split will meet both our needs so this does simply the situation/discussions.

We transparently complete and then share our Form E financial disclosures and then an independent barrister reviews and recommends the content of the financial consent form (which hopefully we will agree on), which then get submitted to the courts for a clean break agreement. We preferred this approach rather than having our own lawyers as likely to get adversarial. Early days but so far so good.