Why legal bills spiral

Every separation has its essential costs, the spending a situation genuinely needs, which we look at in what a separation actually costs. This guide is about the other part of the bill, the extra that gathers on top of those essentials and buys nothing but more conflict. It is where most of the largest bills come from, and the striking thing about it is that no one ever decides to run one up. It builds instead from a long series of small, reasonable-looking choices, while nobody quite stops to add them all together.

How an ordinary separation reached $860,000

In 2017 a Family Court judge, Justice Benjamin, looked at a separating couple who had run up around $860,000 in legal costs between them. Their case, known as Simic and Norton, finally settled on the seventh day of its hearing, by which time most of that money was long gone. He described the amounts as, on their face, "outrageous levels of costs for ordinary people".

What is worth pausing on is not the size of the number but how two ordinary people ever arrived at it. Reading through the file, the judge found page after page of letters between the solicitors, many of them long, accusatory and trading point for point, a good number serving no real purpose, all written in a spirit of conceding nothing and pursuing every last issue to the end. Very little of that was essential to resolving anything. It was the extra, almost all of it, and it took no single dramatic decision to create. It simply needed no one, on either side, willing to stop.

Where the extra spending comes from

The forces below are what gradually turn a manageable matter into something like that one. None of them feels like waste while it is happening, which is exactly why they are so effective.

The first is that letters tend to multiply. Every letter has to be drafted, read and answered, and every answer invites another in reply, so a disagreement that lives in correspondence quietly bills for each round, and each round tends to produce the next. The most effective thing you can do to slow this is to consolidate your contact and come to it prepared, which we look at in why one good meeting beats ten phone calls.

The second is that conflict hardens over time. When one person digs in, the other usually digs in to match them, and positions that might have been bridged easily at the start become entrenched, and entrenched positions are slow and expensive to hold.

The third is the pull of everything already spent. People worn down by a long and bruising process often find themselves thinking that they have come too far to stop now. It can feel like resolve, like seeing the thing through, when in truth it is the exact reasoning that turns a large bill into an enormous one, because each new round gets justified by the size of the last.

The fourth is simple delay. Time is billed, so adjournments, slow disclosure and missed openings to settle all quietly add hours, and those hours never come back.

And the last is that court can arrive almost by default. Very few people actively decide to litigate. More often they simply fail to settle, again and again, until a courtroom is the only room left to be in. Noticing that slow drift towards court is the first real step in resisting it.

Why it is so hard to see at the time

If all of this seems obvious set out on a page, that is precisely the trap. From inside a separation, none of it announces itself as wasteful. Each letter feels necessary as you send it. Each refusal to give ground feels like standing up for yourself. The line between genuinely protecting your position and simply going round in circles is very hard to see in the moment and clear only afterwards, often once the money has already gone. That is not a flaw in your judgement. It is what sustained conflict does to anyone caught up in it.

How to step away from it

You cannot always lower your essential costs, but you can almost always do something about the extra, and it nearly always comes down to seeing that fork in the road a little sooner. Get clear advice early, so you understand what is genuinely worth pursuing and what is not. Decide, while you are calm, what actually matters most to you, so that you are not making expensive decisions in the middle of being upset. Keep your dealings deliberate rather than reactive, and try to reach agreement in as few exchanges as you can. None of this is about spending less for its own sake. It is about being clear-headed enough to notice the choice while the money is still yours to keep.

The short version

No one chooses a runaway bill. The extra spending lands on top of what a separation genuinely needed, built from many small, reasonable-looking choices that no one quite adds up until the end. You cannot always change your essential costs. You can almost always do something about the extra, and the way you do it is by noticing the fork in the road early, before the money is gone.