Assembling the jigsaw puzzle: understanding financial settlement on divorce

Abstract

This briefing paper sets out the key initial findings from a study of financial settlement on divorce. The study involved a survey of nearly 400 court files in financial remedy cases concluded by various dates within 2010-12 from four courts in different areas of England and interviews with 32 family justice professionals – solicitors and mediators – practising in those four regions, exploring their experience of handling these types of cases. We cannot claim that our selection of cases in the court file survey is statistically representative of all divorces with a financial order in England and Wales, but we sought to gather data reflecting the typical business of a reasonable spread of different courts in varied geographical locations. All data were collected before implementation of the recent legal aid reforms by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO). A full discussion of the methodology, other technical issues and our findings may be found in the online research report (available at website address listed at the end of this briefing).