Consent order drafted by court clerk?

Hi,

We are in the midst of a financial dispute resolution process. We have a pre-trial hearing coming up in just a few days, and we have all of a sudden agreed the terms on which we are willing to settle. They are quite straightforward - no property involved, just money and a share in a limited company.

Now we both want to minimise costs and my wife have allegedly found out that we could turn up at a hearing without lawyers, and say we want to settle, upon which a court clerk would draft a Consent Order for us and the judge can approve it straight away.

My solicitors will obviously try to tell me out of it, but I wanted to hear an independent opinion. Does such option indeed exist, and are there any major drawbacks, provided that the agreement between us is quite simple?

Thank you!

A Court clerk will not draft an order for you. They are specifically not allowed to give legal advice and certainly not draft orders.

You mention the pre-trial hearing - do you mean the Financial Dispute Resolution (FDR) hearing? If that is the case the judge is meant to assist you in reaching an agreement.

If you have a particularly benevolent judge they might help assist with the order but it is doubtful as it will be a waste of the Court's time to turn up for a hearing to help you reach settlement when you already have one.

Even if a judge (assuming it is a judge - since the introduction of the Unified Family Court there is a chance that there will be Magistrates dealing with the hearing who seldom have any legal qualifications) were to help, it is not the work of a moment to draft an order dealing with anything let alone a limited company.

It is more likely that the hearing will be vacated and you will be sent away to sort out the order and file it with the Court within a set period.

My advice would be to have a drafted order ready and take it to Court for approval. You could use a fixed fee service like the one on this site but time appears to be very limited so I would use the solicitor who is already instructed.

You could try drafting it yourself which is perfectly acceptable. The template is available at the Court website:- www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/...l-remedy-omnibus.doc - Note is says "Adapt as necessary" which means deleting the bits that don't apply.

Charles