Inevitably such legal battles can become very costly where they are fuelled by acrimony and lack of trust, making agreement and compromise difficult to achieve.
Sometimes, where there is a high level of agreement and respect on separation this can be placed under great strain by the often difficult divorce process.
Specialist non-legal support with the divorce process can be a great help and divorce coaches and consultants can be engaged to support an individual with the often very difficult and draining emotional aspects of separation while the legal process is ongoing.
Typically, it is the most acrimonious divorces that end up with either party making a financial remedy application to the family court.
This is usually because there are some fundamental issues that the couple cannot agree on that they need to ask the court to determine, whether that is in relation to the value of the assets, or a suspicion that assets have not been disclosed that should be, or even whether an asset should be shared at all or kept by one party as non-matrimonial.
Sometimes, even where the couple are clear about the extent of what all the assets are, and there is more than enough to share beyond what either party needs, if they simply cannot agree on how they should be divided, and who should get what, particularly where there are different types of assets, some of which may be more liquid than others, some more risk-laden than others, and may be of sentimental value, then the court is likely to be applied to determine how the assets should be divided.
However, there is an increasing encouragement by the legal system for separating parties to use non-court dispute resolution, such as mediation or the collaborative divorce process, where at all possible.
Mediation and the collaborative process in particular tend to be most effective and successful when the parties remain on relatively amicable terms with each other, as they involve parties working together constructively, negotiating solutions that they are both happy with.
While London still holds its reputed status as the divorce capital of the world – largely due to it being the jurisdiction of choice for wives of very wealthy husbands seeking to take advantage of the discretionary approach of the family court and the established starting point of equal sharing of the matrimonial assets – there are still some significant disadvantages to using the court process.
