Form E

[sunshine378]

Has anyone had help from a solicitor to fill out a Form E?

How much did it cost you? The solicitor I'm in touch with has quoted £1000

Everyone’s finances are different. Each client is different and expects different things from their solicitor.

Its impossible to compare, but £1000 would be less than 4 hours work. You’d want an initial meeting of perhaps 90 minutes, around an hour to do the initial draft, then time for revisions and further time to get the enclosures together. If you seem the type to be disorganised (dump a carrier bag of random paperwork in your solicitors office - bank statements missing etc) I’d add at least another hour on my time estimate for that alone.

Honestly the form E is really simple - you would have to gather all the info yourself for them to fill it in anyway. I think I paid about £1200 for my divorce all in which was just for solicitor to review my form E that I had completed and draft the consent order.

Thanks for your reply.

@Newnormal99 Did you use the Form E for mediation? Or did it go to court? Or did you sort out the finances just between yourselves? I'm just interested how you kept the cost so low and how I could do this. Any tips would be appreciated!

Just trying to keep my costs down and my solicitor has warned if it goes to court it could cost £40k!!!

Thanks for your help.

@sunshine378

No all agreed between us. I owned a property before we lived together and got married so we had done a declaration thing then. We were both happy to stick to that (70/30 to me) . Pensions we kept what was in our own name - savings / loan we kept.

Tbh ex was disorganised and crap with money so focused on short term of me buying him out property so he got cash. He didn't even have a solicitor. I did all the forms myself. Solicitor literally just reviewed form e, the gave me a bit of advice so I tweaked it and he drafted consent.

I know someone split before me and she has only just finalised it with court. 5 years on.

That sounds like an awful lot of money. Perhaps if you need some help to complete it there are accountants who would do it for less?

www.advicenow.org.uk/guides/how-fill-your-financial-statement-form-e-film

As Collaborate says, that's not bad for about 4 hours work. Accountants wouldn't be best placed, either do it yourself if you're very confident of getting it right, otherwise it is always worth paying a solicitor. If you're dealing with assets of many hundreds of thousands of pounds, paying £1k to get the Form E right is going to be an investment.

It's not strictly true to say accountants wouldn't be best placed. If I was concerned about inaccuracies in a Form E, I think a forensic accountant would be at least as well placed to review it as a solicitor. A lot of law firms have in house forensic accountants for this kind of thing.

Obviously though if you give it to a Family Solicitor you know they have the right experience whereas if you get an accountant to do it then it needs to be one with the right training and experience!