If you need legal advice, don't ask a solicitor. The divorce laws in England are in a mess. There are no absolute truths, no right and wrong & no justice. There is also no sign of any common sense.
If you ask for legal advice from a solicitor the answer will be vague, a matter of conjecture & depending on other matters which have to be evaluated later.
A straightforward appraisal of the situation is not what they're paid for or capable of.
The law appears to be a fluid mass of mud that solicitors love to wade through.
The divorce laws have evolved through decades of legal rulings of precedent. Therefore there are no cut and dried rules as every case has different aspects.
They will endeavour on your behalf to come to some reasonable resolution of the problem but obviously this could take some time. Taking time means thousands of pounds of your hard earned money.
You may think that you need a lawyer to give you a bit of help negotiating a tricky financial settlement with your wife. You may think that you need a solicitor to help you with the complicated legal procedures necessary to obtain a divorce in the British courts. My advice would be, if you have the slightest hope of sorting it out yourselves then do that. Once you get into the hands of a divorce lawyer you will both loose more than you bargained for.
The first thing to go will be any good will that you had between you. Prepare yourself for all the old hatreds resurfacing. Many couples have bitter separations and are trying to rebuild their lives after splitting up. Any compassionate thoughts you might have regained after living apart from each other for a while will soon be destroyed.
If you have children they will become minor pawns, neglected and betrayed by both parents.
Your solicitor will point out to you that someone has to file for divorce. This has to be done under one of several headings. The grounds for divorce are; adultery, unreasonable behaviour, two years desertion, two years separation, five years separation.
Your solicitor will probably not want you to go for the two year separation or desertion as it doesn't give them enough to do. They will prefer to guide you in to putting in a claim for unreasonable behaviour or adultery. This will give them lots of work to do and increase your bill.
In the beginning you probably thought that the solicitor and the court had specific guidelines and that soon your solicitor will come up with a concrete analysis of the legal situation which will then be drafted and executed. No. Your solicitor will be vague about the law and the court and leave you totally in the dark about what is going on.
You will be warned that you are under a legal obligation to declare all of your finances. That any slight dishonesty in your accounts (benefit fraud, tax evasion, money laundering) will be reported to the authorities.
Then the process begins. Letters, basically. Years of letters bouncing between you & your solicitor. Your spouse and their solicitor. From solicitor to solicitor. And then the replies all reciprocated at length in between all parties.
Then the bills start rolling in. Your solicitor may be charging you £140.00 per hour, which is quite expensive just for a letter writer.
When you start to feel that the legal process isn't going anywhere you may like to try mediation.
This is when you find out how much animosity has been created by the legal process so far.
This mediation is overseen by a solicitor who will probably give you lots of conflicting advice showing that they have no idea of the legal process either. They may even be tempted to give you bad advice like, ' why don't you sell your house.' And then six months later you find yourself homeless with all your house assets frozen.
Another process of mediation is the preliminary court hearing which is supposed to stop divorces clogging up the legal system.
This is held in judges chambers. They are previously supplied with all the relevant financial details and evaluate them. Both solicitors make their cases and the judge then makes a considered judgement.
This is an estimate of what is likely to happen if the case comes to court. But the judgement is not binding.
This in itself is an expensive exercise as it will involve both of your solicitors charging you for the whole day, court costs and possibly barristers charges.
Probably by now you've had a few years of this and you are getting confused by the vagaries of the law. You hope that your solicitor knows what they are doing. But then underneath you feel that this whole process is a game that no one understands. Or maybe it's a game that isn't even about divorce.
The marital assets should be divided 50-50. Why does it take three years for two teams of solicitors and a court to divide a number by two? Ah well. That's because you have to go through due legal process.
As the final county court hearing approaches the process then turns into a complete farce.
The solicitors start producing sworn affidavits full of lies, assets are concealed. Just when your expecting someone to stand up and say, 'enough is enough.' Just when your thinking 'isn't that illegal?', your solicitor, who you now owe £20,000, phones up and tells you to settle out of court.
So all those questions that you had in the beginning have now been multiplied a hundred times.
And you can't afford to ask your lawyer any more questions.
You never got any legal advice. Just the due process of law.