By Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce · Updated
Family law is slow everywhere. That makes deliberate delay unusually effective, because it is almost perfectly camouflaged.
| The diagnostic question | Who benefits from the current arrangement continuing? |
|---|---|
| Why it works | Delay is indistinguishable from ordinary slowness, and family matters are genuinely slow. |
| What it costs you | Legal fees, time, and — where the status quo favours them — position. |
| The status quo problem | The longer an arrangement runs, the more weight it can acquire, particularly with children. |
| What makes it addressable | A dated record of commitments made and missed. |
| One instance | Noise. |
| Four instances with dates | A pattern, and patterns can be raised. |
Keeping track of dates like these across a stack of letters is exactly what SortMyDivorce does — start a free trial, no card needed.
Start here, because the assumption that it always is will make you miserable and will damage your credibility when you raise it.
Family matters are slow for structural reasons. Courts are congested. Disclosure genuinely takes weeks. Valuations and expert reports take longer. Lawyers carry heavy caseloads and are in court on other matters. Accountants have their own timetables. People get ill, take holidays, and have their own lives collapsing around them.
So the question is never simply "is this slow?" It is: who benefits from it being slow?
Ask what the current arrangement is, and who it favours.
If your spouse is living in the family home, controlling the finances, or has the children on the current schedule, then every month that passes is a month of the arrangement they want. Resolution changes that. Delay preserves it.
If the current arrangement disadvantages them, delay costs them too, and what you are seeing is probably genuine slowness.
This single question resolves most cases, and it is worth asking early rather than after eight months of frustration.
There is a second version worth asking: who is running out of money first? Delay is expensive for both sides, but rarely equally. If one party has substantially more capacity to sustain legal costs, extending the process is a way of converting that advantage into a settlement.
None of these is conclusive alone. Together, and repeatedly, they are a picture.
Disclosure in instalments. Documents produced a few at a time over months, each tranche requiring a chasing letter. Individually explicable; cumulatively a method.
Extensions requested as a matter of course. Not once, for a reason — every time, close to the deadline.
Availability problems. Nobody is ever available for the mediation date, the four-way meeting, the call.
New issues appearing late. Just as things approach resolution, something new is raised that requires its own round.
Changing lawyers at a significant moment. Sometimes entirely legitimate. It also resets timetables, because a new firm has to read in.
Responses that do not respond. A letter that arrives on time and answers nothing, requiring a further letter to get the answer.
Settled issues reopening. Covered in its own guide, and one of the most effective forms of delay because it recycles work already done.
Money. Every chasing letter, every extension, every re-explained position is billable on both sides. Delay is expensive by design, and if their capacity to absorb that cost exceeds yours, the cost is doing their negotiating for them.
Position. This is the one people underestimate. In some contexts the longer an arrangement runs, the harder it becomes to change — particularly arrangements involving children, where continuity itself carries weight. Delay can quietly convert a temporary situation into the default.
Everything else. Your capacity to work, to sleep, to parent, to plan. A matter that could have concluded in a year taking three is not just three times the cost; it is three years of your life spent inside it.
You cannot address a pattern you cannot evidence, and "they're dragging it out" is not evidence. This is:
20 Jun — What was committed: Financial disclosure to be provided · By whom: Them · What happened: Not received
14 Jul — What was committed: Chased — undertook to provide "within two weeks" · By whom: Them · What happened: Not received
2 Aug — What was committed: Partial disclosure provided (items 1–5 of 16) · By whom: Them · What happened: Incomplete
28 Aug — What was committed: Undertook to provide balance by 8 Sep · By whom: Them · What happened: Not received
Four rows. Dates, commitments, outcomes. No adjectives.
That table is usable in correspondence, in a settlement conference, in an application, and in a conversation with your own lawyer about strategy. The same information held as a feeling is usable nowhere.
Record your own side too. If you have met every commitment and they have met none, that asymmetry is the point, and it is only visible if both are logged.
The available options depend entirely on your jurisdiction and the stage of your matter, and this is a conversation for your lawyer. But the shape of it is generally:
Impose a timetable. Most systems have some mechanism for getting deadlines set by a court rather than agreed between the parties. A timetable that carries consequences behaves very differently from one that does not.
Use the disclosure mechanisms. Where the delay is in disclosure specifically, there are usually procedural routes to compel it. In Alberta, for example, there is a desk application route to a Disclosure Order that does not require a hearing.
Move the forum. If correspondence is going nowhere, mediation, a settlement conference, or a court step changes the dynamic — partly because it puts a date in the calendar that neither side controls.
Raise conduct. In some jurisdictions, how parties have conducted themselves is relevant to costs. Whether that is available where you are, and whether your record supports it, is a question for your lawyer. What is universally true is that it is only available if the record exists.
Two things worth saying, because delay works partly by wearing people down.
Do not respond to slowness with more correspondence. The instinct is to chase harder. Chasing is billable, it rarely accelerates anything, and a high volume of increasingly frustrated letters weakens rather than strengthens a record. One clear chaser with a date, then escalate through the mechanisms.
Separate what you control from what you do not. You control your own disclosure, your own record, your own deadlines and your own preparation. You do not control their pace. People who focus on the first list cope substantially better than people who focus on the second, and — not coincidentally — they arrive at the resolution point better prepared.
You usually cannot tell from any single instance. Ask who benefits from the status quo, and log commitments and outcomes over time. A pattern of missed commitments by the party who benefits from delay is about as clear as this gets.
In most systems, yes — court-imposed timetables, disclosure orders, and applications all put dates in place that are not within the other side's control. What is available depends on your jurisdiction and stage. Ask your lawyer.
In some jurisdictions conduct is relevant to costs; in others it is not, or only in narrow circumstances. This is genuinely jurisdiction-specific. What is consistent is that any such argument needs a dated, factual record, so keep one regardless of whether you ever use it.
Meet your own commitments — always, and visibly. Not to compensate, but because the contrast is the strongest part of your record, and because you never want the answer to "why has this taken two years" to include anything about you.
No, and it needs a different response. That is covered separately in our guide on what to do when your divorce lawyer isn't responding.
Last reviewed August 2026. Researched and written by Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice — laws, fees and forms change, so please confirm current details with your court’s official website or a local family lawyer.
Upload your lawyer letters and SortMyDivorce sorts every deadline, offer and issue into one calm dashboard, automatically.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. Laws change and differ by jurisdiction — confirm specifics with a local family lawyer or your court's official website. If you use SortMyDivorce, your letters stay confidential — never shared, never sold.