Book review: DIY divorce by John Bolch

The dan­ger of DIY books is that they are bought by those who lack the expe­ri­ence train­ing and tal­ent to exe­cute the skill described, or the money to hire some­one who has. Geeklawyer speaks with the full authen­tic­ity of a man who owns a DIY wood­work­ing book. Gen­er­ally the result is an amus­ing disaster.

DIY law books suf­fer the same risks: DIY con­veyanc­ing, DIY patents and DIY War Crimes tri­als. That said, while many such DIY books tar­get issues which really do need a pro­fes­sional ser­vice, in a hushed whis­per Geeklawyer will admit that some things can be done entirely appro­pri­ately by non-lawyers: small claim civil cases, admin­is­tra­tive appeals and even very minor crim­i­nal mat­ters — park­ing tick­ets etc.

John Bolch sallys forth into the DIY law arena with a book on a topic in which he can prop­erly be said to be expert: Divorce. John is a solic­i­tor with 25 years of expe­ri­ence in divorce and the author of the highly infor­ma­tive Family-Lore blog.

Geeklawyer has not yet been trapped in the no-man’s land of mar­riage: there was a recent near-disaster with an enemy patrol from which he escaped after a vicious fight­ing retreat, cov­ered by sup­port­ing fire from loyal chums and aspi­rant women. For such as him­self this book may have been use­ful. Bolch makes it clear that there are many sit­u­a­tions where going DIY is a bad idea but even then, he says, the book should pay for itself many times over by reduc­ing legal fees through enabling the reader to do mun­dane tasks him­self, rather than pay a lawyer his hourly rate to do them.

The book con­tains the thing text­books rarely con­tain: detailed worked exam­ples of court forms and com­mon sense advice on ways to pro­ceed. Bolch clearly explains the things that need to be done, step by step, with the deci­sions to be made and the alter­na­tives explained.  He does so in a  jar­gon free but acces­si­ble and accu­rate way. If there were any crit­i­cism it would be that some very lim­ited exam­ples from case law might have been use­ful, for exam­ple on what was ‘unrea­son­able behav­iour’, such as protests by a wife about being given a well deserved beat­ing. Caselaw exam­ples have their down­side of course; they’d make the book larger and there is an argu­ment against turn­ing it into a GCSE Divorce text­book, so it was rea­son­able not to do so. Geeklawyer was also of the view that the book needs it own web­site for errata and per­haps fur­ther help, but that’s a fairly nig­gling point.

For £7 from Ama­zon this is a no-brainer pur­chase. Geeklawyer has a copy on his book­shelf — with sui­cide pills taped to the inside cover in case it fails to be effective.