Couple Spends £2.3m In Legal Fees When Net Assets Only £1.76m
A High Court Judge decreed that the only beneficiaries in Mr and Mrs Crowther’s “nihilistic” divorce were their lawyers, with the couple’s children being the main losers.
In a highly critical judgment, Mr Justice Peel blamed the solicitors on both sides for “the unseemly correspondence” in the case. He said 34 courts hearings had gone into resolving Paul and Caroline Crowther’s divorce, with both the parties and their lawyers adopting “a bitterly fought adversarial approach”. “The parties have argued before me about almost every imaginable issue, no matter how trivial… Unsurprisingly, the legal costs are enormous.”
It is appalling that in a case with £1.76m net of assets, legal fees for the couples’ combined legal teams amounted to £2.3m. As the Judge himself made clear, “My task is far more difficult than it should be precisely because the visible assets are now so limited. In the end, I have largely had to concentrate on how to divide the debts fairly.”
Each time reported cases such as these are published, they produce an outcry. And yet they still happen. The question we all need to answer is the extent to which the adversarial process acts as a catalyst for conflict. Is two-sided family litigation simply amplifying division rather than looking for solutions? Mr Justice Peel’s observations of the way the litigation had been managed were telling:
“The mercifully limited exposure I have had to the inter-solicitor correspondence was sufficient for me to see that there appears to have been an almost complete breakdown of constructive communication… At the trial itself, there were over thirty issues on the composite asset schedule presented to me, some of trifling amounts; by the end of the trial, only minimal attempts had been made to resolve the many smaller items, despite encouragement from me to do so.”
“It seems to me that it has led to vast costs and reduced scope for settlement. The toll on each party is incalculable (W was visibly distressed during the hearing) and, from what I have heard, the impact on the children has been highly detrimental.” “The main losers are probably the children who, quite apart from the emotional pain of seeing their parents involved in such bitter proceedings, will be deprived of monies which I am sure their parents would otherwise have wanted them to benefit from in due course.”
Had Mr and Mrs Crowther known when they separated that they would wipe out all their net assets and take on a further £500k debt by such an aggressive, adversarial approach to divorce, might they have re-thought their approach? Perhaps. But more pressingly for all of us, what does this case say about the state of Family Justice? Can it ever be proportionate for professional fees to explode to such an extent that they wipe all the available assets? Do we need more checks and balances to ensure the total legal spend matches the issues and the available resources?
At The Divorce Surgery, we are committed to a fixed fee which the couple share, not only because it is transparent, but because it allows couples to budget. You budget for a house move, why not for a divorce?
Author Name: Editor
Published content by The Divorce Surgery Editorial Team.
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