The BBC has announced that it is launching an investigation into so-called ‘Quickie Divorces’ and how safe these services are for customers to use, following years of complaints about this growing and unregulated industry it seems about time this is looked into.
You just have to look through the first handful of reviews to get the picture that these brightly advertised services mostly do not deliver what they promise. The majority of the reviews are headed **SCAM**. The first questions that pop up in a search on Quickie Divorce are: Is it legit? What am I paying for? What am I missing? These are good questions.
It seems that some are not legit, and will do nothing at all after you pay them the money. Moving up the scale, there are services that will simply charge you to fill in the divorce application form which you can do yourself for free on the government website. They offer no case handling, advice or input. On the financial side there appear to be websites that will let you choose from some template options to piece together a consent order, which will then permanently and irrevocably determine how your finances are divided. If they’re not going through your financial circumstances in detail, and getting to know the full picture and giving you advice on it, then there is no way to know whether the terms of your order do what you want, or are fair to you both.
There are then many services offering a range of levels of care along the way. It is hard to understand what you really get with these. At the bottom line, if it’s cheap you won’t get any service out of them if things go wrong or if you have questions, because you haven’t paid them to do that. If the service is unregulated, they could tell you absolutely anything and you have no recourse to hold them accountable.
My own experience of dealing with botched divorces or financial settlements which have either been done through an online ‘Quickie’ service or not done at all because the service disappeared and left the client hanging, is that without someone involved who is accountable for what they do for you, you can easily be left with an expensive nothing, or frankly worse, something that cannot be undone and you are stuck with permanently.
Divorce
As a family lawyer, here are some reasons why I would never let anyone I know do an online Quickie-Divorce.
- It won’t make anything quicker. You are still reliant on the court processing time, and the statutory waiting limits. They’re high volume processing service. They will do your application when they get round to it and have no reason to be proactive in chasing the Court or the Respondent.
- It’s a difficult time, there is so much more going on in your mind than just wondering which boxes to fill in on a form. You need a real life person to help you with that. That person should be accountable for the advice they give you because it’s complex, technical and hard work.
- A service offering a small fee (I’ve seen these from £39 to about £300) to do your divorce for you is going to do nothing more than get you to give them the information to fill in the same form you can fill in yourself online through the government website. They also haven’t told you upfront that the court fee of £593 has to be paid.
- If anything is more complex, you want to discuss timing or anything goes wrong in the process, you can’t speak to anyone about it.
- If it all runs smoothly, and you get your final order in the divorce in the minimum possible time of 6 months, then you’ve still wasted your money because they haven’t added anything to the service you could have done yourself and they were never able to help you if anything went wrong or got delayed.
Money
Template based consent order services offering a quick financial settlement (at charges around £300 – £1,500) are also something I would be extremely wary of. Unless you can be sure that you are getting advice from a qualified and regulated solicitor who is going to take the time to know your circumstances and think about your situation, don’t bother. Once the thing is signed and approved at court it (almost certainly) can’t be undone.
In every single case I’ve ever worked in that starts with my client telling me that the finances are “all agreed, completely simple, no advice needed” there has inevitably always been some issue they’ve not considered and need advice on. In practical terms this means something I can save them money on by advising them about something they weren’t aware of.
The most expensive things people miss out on are:
- Pension claims. They didn’t know that a pension in someone else’s name from someone else’s work can be shared. Even if they did know, they didn’t get advice and decided to do some rough maths on how the pension could be split, and one or other or both of them ended up with pensions worth a lot less than could have been achieved.
- Tax planning. Tax is complex, and its not surprising how often people don’t know when it applies to them, their business, their assets or their marriage. They didn’t know that CGT might be payable, or that the rules on CGT liabilities on separation change every so often, so can’t make the most of tax planning, or they don’t realise that tax not payable immediately might roll over and be payable on a sale of the house in the future, and they get stuck with it. Tax on foreign assets can also be a tricky area, and accepting a holiday home abroad as part of a settlement might not be at all as valuable as it sounds on paper once you have gone through the transfer process. Tax arising on sale of a shareholding or business can impact across several tax years.
- Business assets. Without proper advice it can be hard to know exactly what a business is worth, and I have seen estimated values from client be very wildly wrong both above and below the true value. This often needs a bit of investigation, but getting it right saves everyone money in the long-term.
- Maintenance claims. Often it’s not obvious how and when maintenance should be paid or how long for, or how payments for support for things like school fees can be protected and enforced. Assumptions about maintenance are frequently strongly held, but very different to what the law says. Whether paying or receiving, the issue is often a heated one, and settlements are sometimes made by compromise just to end the dispute, costing one party or the other a huge amount of money if the maintenance aware is wrong.
- Post settlement planning. Have you done your will, changed your insurances to protect your income and your children, put authorities in place to do things your ex-spouse might have been responsible for taking care of? A solicitor will point you in the right direction and let you know what considerations about the wider implications of divorce you need to have in mind.
In summary, if you don’t get the advice, you won’t know what you need to know, or even that you need to know it.
When you’re looking to get advice from a solicitor, speak to them first before you commit to anything, make sure you feel comfortable with them and that you can work together. They will be aware that you are at the start of what will, at absolute best, be a rocky journey at times, and with that in mind, they are already doing their best to make it a ‘Quickie’ for you. Where they can’t, they will be there to advise you, let you know why, what’s going on and what you need to do next.
If you have any queries about divorce, please contact our Family Team on 0345 646 0406 or fill in our online enquiry form and a member of our Team will be in touch.