Finances on divorce
What leads a court to order a husband and his companies to pay £1.5 million towards his wife’s legal costs in financial proceedings in divorce? In a case this month* a husband, Mr M, was ordered to personally pay a little over £1 million towards his wife’s legal fees. The companies in the case, which…
It is entirely understandable that people seek an answer to the question “what are my rights?” when entering a divorce process. Rights in this context are about entitlement, and what that individual is entitled to. So what are you entitled to when you divorce? If I answer this question by focussing on financial entitlement, money…
To enable anyone to answer the question “Can I keep the house or will I be forced to sell after divorce?” for you, you will need to be able to give them a broad idea about what your total “asset pot” is. Otherwise, it is similar to asking a midwife whether your newborn will go…
This is a question which is at the forefront of people’s minds when they seek advice. How long does the process take? I will answer this with the help of one (celebrity) case which may conclude in a total of three months, and another (extraordinary) case which took sixteen years to finish. The key to…
Family solicitors use previous cases to name things. So we have Calderbank letters from Calderbank v Calderbank, Rose orders from Rose v Rose and Mesher orders from Mesher v Mesher and Hall. I appreciate that this is not too helpful for the individual who is self-represented, or I suppose for the individual involved, whose name…
I was contacted this week and asked to write about a specific problem which has arisen in the life of a reader’s family member, who has suffered a relationship breakdown, and is unmarried, not on the house deeds and is unable to agree on contact arrangements for the children of the family. This made me…
The difficulty of agreeing on the values of smaller items in a divorce can present a barrier to settlement. However, we have been reminded recently that proportionality is the “name of the game”*. To resolve a financial dispute there needs to be an agreement between the parties as to the values of the assets and…
Catching up with the new case law this week, I was interested to find that one contained a paragraph titled “A Warning”*. There is usually a need to tease out threads from a judgement, raising different opinions on how those views will be applied to future cases, but there can be no doubt that in…
I am always surprised by the extent to which Milton Keynes* is dismissed as a concrete cow wasteland. It is, admittedly, a bit different to anywhere else in the UK . One of the initiatives that is taking place in MK at the moment is also a bit different: the pioneering Fast Track programme for…
Social media certainly has the capacity to get people into legal difficulties. The High Court found last week that a tweet posted by Sally Bercow was libellous, and as a result, she is going to be paying out damages for those 140 costly characters posted on the Twitter website. In the family law world last…
