Divorce online is delivering a national end-to-end digital service for individuals and/or their legal representatives to make an application to legally end a marriage or civil partnership and resolve associated financial issues. There is an online system for legal representatives to apply for divorce on behalf of a client.
A further element of a fully digital divorce process is a digital process for financial remedy.
Background
The financial remedy project, for a digital financial remedy, started in 2017 to create a more efficient service enabling the parties to view their cases and progress. Consented financial remedy cases were taking 77 days on average from issue to final order in the year to April 2018. We involved stakeholders from the beginning, starting with an inception event with the judiciary and operational teams. It was important to ensure our stakeholders were involved with the conception and enhancements to digitalising this process. The Department for Work and Pensions and pension companies also signed up to the pilot.
Stage 1 of the pilot, 'Apply for a consent order (Form A, form D81)', began testing in the South West Regional Divorce Centre (RDC) in August 2018 with 5 members of the judiciary and 5 firms of solicitors.
The system was very much a basic Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to start with, with much of the manual work being completed by operations staff at the RDC; feedback from this was that it was time consuming and a more efficient service was needed.
We worked quickly to improve this and enabled the orders to be reviewed and completed digitally by both judges and case administration personnel.
With the system working well, we increased the number of solicitors using the system gradually and with that, increased the number of judges completing the work. We also moved the administration of the work to the Courts and Tribunal Service Centre (CTSC) in Stoke.
During the bedding-in process, we held a weekly call with solicitors to gain feedback and ideas on improvements for the system, this helped us to tweak and improve the system. The weekly calls were minuted. With the improvements to the system, the service is now mandated and being used by solicitors nationally with over 300 judges trained.
To ensure we are gathering feedback on the system, we have a monthly call with the divorce and financial remedy stakeholders. The calls are minuted.
We also hold a weekly call with the CTSC to ensure their workload is manageable and to inform them of any enhancement rollouts to the system. These calls are also minuted.
With the process starting with an MVP, there have been no real problems with implementing the new process. Implementation of the financial remedy digital process has been on track, with 18 months for an end-to-end consent orders process. Initial concerns about judges embracing new processes proved unnecessary as financial remedy is used by 86% of users with consent orders more readily accepted and contested orders more complex to review.
Impact of the actions
In bringing in the consent order digital online service and listening to feedback we have greatly improved the timeliness. It now takes an average of 35 days from issue to final order. However, this includes cases which are referred to a judge more than once. The average time from issue to final order is now on average 7 days. This is recorded on work state reports.
FRCs are being rolled out nationally, they will deal with mainly contested applications and any consent order handoffs. We have a bi-weekly call with the digital implementors for the regions. We also hold monthly meetings with the lead FRC judges.
Comment by stakeholders
Examples of positive feedback from service users and tweets received from solicitors using the system:
Love a competition but can anyone beat my record? Order submitted via online
