Who pays for the court case?

The usual order is for each party to be responsible for their own legal costs.

This can change if a party is guilty of poor litigation conduct such as failure to make full and proper disclosure and an application to court is made to obtain an unless order. If that course of action is necessary, the party at fault will likely be required to pay for the legal costs of making the application and attending court.

There is a method that is available to put your ex under pressure and risk having to pay a large chunk of your legal fees.

The method is to make your ex an offer to settle ‘without prejudice save as to costs’. The offer is referred to by lawyers as a Calderbank offer as it is named after the case Calderbank v Calderbank 1975. In this case, Mrs Calderbank had made a number of reasonable offers marked ‘without prejudice save as to costs’ which had been turned down by Mr Calderbank and which he failed to do better or beat when the case came before the court for trial. He was ordered to pay Mrs Calderbank’s legal costs.