How OurFamilyWizard Can Help Reduce Your Legal Fees
Separated parents often find it difficult to communicate with one another in relation to their children. If you find yourself in this situation, you are not alone. OurFamilyWizard can help.
OurFamilyWizard is the UK’s most popular app for co-parenting. It provides parents with several tools to help them communicate better with one another. When parents communicate better, they tend to need less help from their solicitors, which means less money is spent on legal fees.
This article sets out just a few examples of how OurFamilyWizard can help reduce your legal fees.
- Accessible records
- Effective language checker
- Quick solicitor access
- Organised shared calendars
- Accurate communication
- Financial accountability
Accessible records
Parent frequently send their solicitor and the court emails or messages that favour their case. This is referred to as ‘‘cherry-picking’’, resulting in a one-sided picture. If this happens, your solicitor will need to go through all communications between you and the other parent to pull together a full and accurate picture, including:
- manually searching through email chains and messages;
- individually downloading email threads or taking screenshots of messages;
- putting communications in date order; and
- ensuring that everything is in a readable format, such as one large PDF.
The above process takes considerable time, and your solicitor has the right to charge you for this.
How OurFamilyWizard can help
The app provides you with a complete and readily accessible record of your communication history with the other parent. From your desktop app, you can download single messages, a full message history, or run a keyword search to pull all messages on a specific topic. This will speed up and simplify the process for your solicitor, thereby reducing your legal fees.
If you are in court proceedings, you can also create within the app, and for free, a record of all or select communication between you and the other parent. This record is easily admissible in court.
Effective language checker
Parents often struggle with language and tone when communicating with one other. In the heat of the moment, they may send something they later regret, causing the other parent to feel upset, angry or undermined.
This often leads to solicitors sending emails and letters back and forth about what’s gone on. Your solicitor will have the right to charge you for each email and letter they send or receive.
How OurFamilyWizard can help
The app has developed a tool called ToneMeter™. ToneMeter will help you anticipate how the tone of your message could be received by the other parent.
It will flag words or phrases as you type that may come across as emotionally charged, giving you the opportunity to modify your message before you press send. This will make your communication more productive and polite, thereby reducing your legal fees.
Quick solicitor access
It’s important to keep your solicitor updated with communications between you and the other parent, particularly if there are things you cannot agree on. To do this, you would typically forward messages or emails from the other parent to your solicitor, or you may decide to call or meet your solicitor to explain what’s been going on.
Your solicitor will have the right to charge you for each email they receive or send and for any time spent on the phone or in meetings with you. These emails and telephone calls add up and cost money.
How OurFamilyWizard can help
You and the other parent can grant your solicitors access to your respective accounts. Through their Practitioner Account account, your solicitor can view all communication between you and the other parent. Your solicitor can also send you messages within the app.
Having quick access to all communication in one place will save your solicitor a lot of time, thereby reducing your legal fees.
It is also worth noting that if granted access, neutral professionals such as mediators, CAFCASS officers, Independent Social Workers and Guardians can access the app and interact with you and the other parent, including creating and accessing parenting schedules and uploading shared files.
Organised shared calendars
It is sometimes difficult to keep on top of a contact schedule, particularly with everything else going on. However, it’s important that both parents stick to what’s been agreed or ordered by the court.
If one parents fails to follow the contact schedule, turns up late, doesn’t turn up at all or tries to change the schedule, the other parent is likely to tell their solicitor. Again, this often leads to solicitors sending emails and letters back and forth. Your solicitor will have the right to charge you for each email and letter they send or receive.
How OurFamilyWizard can help
The app gives you and the other parent access to an interactive shared Calendar. You can use this calendar to clearly record when your child spends time with each parent. You can also request, approve and clearly record time swaps.
As an extra measure of certainty, the OurFamilyWizard Journal gives you and the other parent the ability to verify your arrival and departure at handovers and other locations with the ‘Check-in’ tool. This helps avoid misunderstanding which leads to conflict, thereby reducing your legal fees.
The shared Calendar can also record holidays (including flight and accommodation details), school trips, extra-curricular activities, birthday parties and so forth. If you wish to share additional information with the other parent, such as immunisation records, school reports and the children’s clothing sizes, you can use the handy Info Bank tool.
Accurate communication
Ordinary emails and messages can be tampered, spoofed, forged, edited or deleted. If this happens and if these communications are needed for court purposes, your solicitor will have to spend time working out what’s gone wrong and where the truth lies.
Your solicitor will have the right to charge you for their time doing this. It may even be necessary to instruct a forensic expert, such as a computer or handwriting expert, leadings to further costs, in addition to time and stress.
How OurFamilyWizard can help
The app is a closed system. All communication is backed up. Messages can never be edited, deleted or retracted and include a ‘first-viewed’ timestamp so you know when they have been opened. Having this security and certainty will help reduce your legal fees.
Financial accountability
Keeping track of expenses relating to the children can be tricky, especially where there are additional costs such as extra-curricular activities, private tuition, childcare, school fees and educational and therapeutic support packages.
Where one parent fails to make payment in line with an agreement or court order, or where one parent fails to reimburse the other parent for an expense they covered, disputes tend to follow. As with the other scenarios, this often leads to solicitors sending emails and letters back and forth, increasing your legal costs.
How OurFamilyWizard can help
The app gives you and the other parent access to a shared Expense Log. You can carefully and accurately document your expenses relating to the children, allowing you to see how much the other parent has spent and on what.
You can request reimbursements and record once they’ve been made. You can also upload invoices and receipts. Having this paper trail will help reduce your legal fees.
How much does OurFamilyWizard cost?
The app will cost you £79 per year, giving you access to all the above tools. You will be charged annually. It will cost the other parent the same. If you would also like access to ToneMeter, there is an additional charge of just £8 per year. If you are interested in the more premium package, which includes ToneMeter and greater storage space, it will cost you £99 per year.
There are also fee waivers, including where a parent is approved for help with court fees, receives certain types of benefits, or receives legal aid.
Sign up for OurFamilyWizard today
OurFamilyWizard is not only an invaluable co-parenting tool helping to reduce conflict and empower amicable communication. It is also a money-saving tool that helps you to reduce your legal fees at no more than the cost of a Netflix or Spotify account.
Author's Bio:
Yasmin Khan-Gunns is an Associate at Keystone Law. She advises on all aspects of private family law, specialising in matrimonial and non-matrimonial finance with an international element, complex child relocation applications and wealth protection agreements.
Co-Parenting on OFW
