I recently attended a course provided by Resolution at which a judge and a senior court manager explained to us how the new divorce centre at the Family Court at Bury St Edmunds will work. The court manager told us that he had spent a few hours processing divorce petitions when they were issued so that he could understand what his staff were having to do. Then as an aside, he mentioned that he did not know what happened to the Reconciliation Statements that solicitors have to file at the same time as the divorce petition; his next comment was somewhat mumbled, but we were left with the impression that nothing happens with them at all.
It turns out that, as I have suspected for my entire career, nothing happens with them at all. They are just another piece of pointless paperwork. This revelation got me thinking; how many other pieces of pointless paperwork do we have to contend with as lawyers?
Paper is a major part of a solicitor’s life. Very few solicitors could describe their practises as paperless. Unless something is written down somewhere on a physical piece of paper, it never happened. I like to think that I am somewhat more technologically up to date than some solicitors; one conveyancing solicitor I spoke to recently told me that he did not know how to send an email and that his secretary would therefore forward me an email that they had received that I needed to see; when it arrived, it did so as a PDF. The email had been scanned in and then attached to his secretary’s email to me!
It is still surprisingly common for me to email another solicitor and then a few days later for the reply to arrive in the post.
To be fair, I still rely heavily on paper. The wall of my office is lined with paper files, which I have not got around to archiving yet. All of my files exist in an electronic format stored in a secure online document management system. However, I still work from a largely paper file, and I’m not quite brave enough to destroy the paper file at the end of the case and rely on the electronic archive to store my file forever.
So, what other useless bits of paper are we still producing?
1. The Reconciliation Statement.
This is a statement signed by the solicitor stating whether or not he has given the Petitioner in a divorce advice about reconciliation. It has to be filed with every divorce petition for purposes of statistical monitoring. I am not at all confident that any of this statistical mentoring has been done for years, if ever. Divorce petitions issued by litigants in person don’t have to have be accompanied by this. Moreover, in the good old days when solicitors could do divorces under the Green Form legal aid scheme, it was not required for some reason. It is utterly pointless.
2. Form A application for dismissal purposes.
The Form A application is for a financial order in the divorce where there is no agreement between the parties and they are asking the court to make a financial order.
Where the husband and the wife have reached an agreement, we lodge an agreed financial consent order at the court for the District Judge to approve. Some Family Courts insist that this be accompanied by a Form A marked “for dismissal purposes”. The logic for this is that unless the court has received an application for a financial order, it cannot make an order granting that application.
I always resented having to so this when a court requires it, even more so today, now that the form has grown from 2 pages to 12.
There’s an application for a financial order in the divorce petition. This is enough. It’s another pointless piece of paper.
3. Form E financial statements
The Form E is a detailed financial statement setting out either the husband or wife’s current financial circumstances, supported by lots of financial documents. It’s an essential document that needs to be provided to the other side so that hey receive financial disclosure in any financial close.
However, the rules also provide for the original statement to be filed at the court. It then sits on the court file until the day of the first court appointment. No-one is likely to look at it until the District Judge reads it very quickly before the hearing.
Except that nowadays, he or she also most certainly doesn’t, because since April 2014, we have to also file a court bundle containing all the relevant documents (including the Form E), limited to a maximum of 350 pages contained in an A4 lever arch file. (Woe betide any solicitor who files 351 pages in a foolscap lever arch file). The judge will read this (or I suspect, probably just reads the case summary at the front of the bundle and never looks at the rest).
So the court no longer needs a Form E. Why do we still have to file one?
4. Court Bundles
A court bundle is a lever arch file containing all the relevant documents for a hearing in ascertain order. They used to be only necessary for hearings lasting an hour or more, but since April 2014 they have been required for all hearings whether they are expected to last 5 minutes or 5 days. Vast amounts of paper is produced for each hearing. There needs to be a bundle for each party’s legal representative, one for the court and one for any witnesses. That’s 4 bundles in all, which is bad enough, but if the hearing relates to children and is being heard before magistrates, each of the three magistrates needs one too. So maybe 7 bundles in all. Try carrying that lot home from court afterwards.
The court’s bundle has to be delivered to the court in plenty of time before the hearing. The trouble is that courts nowadays don’t have permanently manned counters so the days of a pleasant stroll to the court and handing it over in person are now over. There is a drop box at the court where documents can be hand delivered, but at my local Family Court the slot is perhaps two inches wide. Try posting a lever ach file through that.
The solicitor with responsibility for preparing all this paper is the solicitor for the applicant; however if the applicant is representing himself or herself, the solicitor for the respondent has to do it instead, something which most of us find pretty frustrating.
It’s astonishing that in the year 2015, we still have to slaughter vast numbers of trees just to to do this. You would think that in this day and age it would be possible to do it all electronically. If I can file my tax return online, why can I not file a client’s divorce petition the same way?
I am looking forward to the day when I can file documents at court electronically and hearings can be paperless, so that all I have to carry with me to court is my iPad. That day will come (the criminal courts are asking for volunteers for a pilot scheme), and it cannot come soon enough. Then all I’ll have to worry about is making sure that my tablet is charged up.
19th July 2015