The High Court has overturned a judge’s decision to forego the financial dispute resolution (FDR) in a case where there was “an ongoing factual dispute about the wife’s earning capacity and that the wife’s position had not crystallised so as to enable the FDR process to be successful”.
The High Court judge directed that the parties should attend a court FDR on the basis that “anecdotally, it facilitates settlement in a significant number of cases. It is not only relatively straightforward cases which are susceptible to settlement at FDR. So, too, are complex cases. In my personal experience, even the most intractable case can yield to settlement at the FDR.”
The short judgment acknowledged that an FDR judge’s indications and observations of a case can be very helpful in “hard cases where one or other part appears utterly intransigent”.