The Ruinous Cost of Divorce in England

A lot of women if they can seek to have financial disputes on divorce determined in England. Perhaps, they fail to take account of the "ruinous costs" that can be incurred in this jurisdiction.

Mr Justice Munby has had yet another go at the level of costs sometimes spent in financial disputes in England. I say "yet another go" because Munby J does seem to get more than his fair share of this type of case.

In the title link case, KSO v MJO (8th December, 2008) he says:

Something must be done about the problems highlighted by this and by too many similar cases. We simply cannot go on as we are. The expenditure of costs on the scale exemplified by this and by too many other such cases is a scandal which must somehow be brought under control.

The way in which the litigation had been conducted had the following consequence:

The denouement was, in hindsight, perhaps not altogether surprising. The litigation simply collapsed under the unsustainable burden of paying costs which had long since become wholly disproportionate to anything at stake and which, by the time the parties arrived at the FDR, had swallowed up a grotesquely large proportion of the never very substantial assets. On 26 November 2008 I received the news that the husband had earlier that day been declared bankrupt on his own petition.

More poignantly Munby J explained:

The picture is deeply dispiriting. And it is not as if it is only the adults who suffer from the consequences of such folly. The luckless children do as well. The present case is a sobering, and for me deeply saddening, example. If, instead of spending – squandering – over £430,000 in costs, the wife and the husband had been able to resolve their differences at a more modest and, dare I say it, more seemly level of costs, there might very well have been enough left in the matrimonial 'pot' to house the wife and children and to enable the children to remain at their school, whilst still leaving something more than a mere consolation prize over for the husband. As it is, it is hard to see much being left from the wreck, not least after the trustee in bankruptcy has had his costs, expenses and remuneration. It is difficult not to be reminded at this point of Jarndyce v Jarndyce (see the Appendix). And the wife and the husband – and for this purpose I refer to them as the mother and the father, for that is what they are – are faced now with the wretched and thankless task of trying to explain to their daughters how it has all come to this.

Warring parents rarely take account of the effects of their battles on their children. Munby J has said these wise words now and he has said them before but I detect that he is becoming dispirited by the fact that parents, husbands and wives who presumably once loved one another, seem not to be getting the message.

Links to previous relevant cases can be found in paragraphs 77-79 of Munby J's judgment.

QUIZ QUESTION: In which case did the wife and her legal team get it so wrong that she had to pay the husband's legal costs to an extent that really wasted her whole application?