Divorce: do you each pay your own lawyer / solicitor?

[freefromh8]

My soon-to-be-ex is saying we have to share the costs of both our solicitors. He says all our costs are shared equally until we're actually divorced, because it comes out of our joint assets. That doesn't sound quite right, that he can hire someone really expensive and ask them endless questions while I am frugal (as always).

Does anyone know if he's right? (We've already agreed to share the divorce petition / D8 costs, but that was all, to my knowledge.)

I’m not a solicitor so this isn’t from a position of real knowledge, but in a few of the big celebrity divorces I’ve read about the legal fees have ended up being paid out of the communal pot (which in those cases usually means whichever partner is the rich one).

For instance, the Ecotricity guy had to pay for his (long divorced) ex wife’s solicitor when she successfully got a second bite of the cherry. I remember that because he was (understandably imo) pretty upset about it.

And Heather Mills’ very expensive barrister was paid by Paul McCartney, from what I recall.

Found this:

"The Court has discretion to order the Respondent to pay the costs. If the Petition is based upon the fault of the Respondent i.e. adultery or unreasonable behaviour, the Petitioner can ask the Court to make an Order for the Respondent to pay the costs of the divorce proceedings. This Order applies to the costs of the divorce proceedings only and not to the costs of the financial proceedings.

The current Rules in respect of financial proceedings on divorce are that there will be no Order as to costs as between the parties. This means that the Husband and Wife each pay their own costs.

However, a Costs Order may be made at any stage of the case, where one party’s litigation conduct justifies it. If, for example, a spouse failed to comply with the Court Rules for financial disclosure or ignores any Court Order, the Court could make an Order against that spouse in respect of that part of the case. It is often the case that one spouse holds more of the assets than the other spouse, which could result in unfairness, if the poorer spouse cannot afford legal costs needed in order to achieve a satisfactory financial settlement. In these circumstances, the poorer spouse may need to investigate obtaining a litigation loan to fund the proceedings, until settlement or trial. There are also circumstances in which the poorer spouse can obtain an Order for maintenance pending suit, i.e. maintenance to tide the spouse over until final settlement or Court Order, which can include a claim for contribution from the richer spouse towards their costs on an ongoing basis.

With regard to proceedings in relation to children, again, the starting point is that each spouse pays their own costs, although there are circumstances when the Court can order one spouse to pay the other’s costs due to the manner in which they have conducted the litigation."

We each paid our own costs- I think a 50/50 split would be unusual but you can get a cost order as pp outlined

Just to say try to avoid court if you can it is expensive!

These days, most people pay their own costs. Unless one partner vastly more wealthy than the other and it was one of those divorces where one pays the other spousal maintenance. Your solicitor will sort it out with the other stuff.

I don't know - I only know what I did.

I was the only one who had a solicitor as I was divorcing him (although he wanted a divorce at it was definitely at least 6/6 as far as 'blame' goes).

We have a very straightforward and amicable divorce though - continued living in the same house for most of the separation etc. At the end of it all he paid half of my solictors costs (which were as low as they could be as there were no letters back and forth - we discussed/agreed things at home and the solictor was just there to rubber stamp the process). If we had a solicitor each (which really wasn't necessary in our case) then I assume we would have just paid our own individual costs.