Why Can I Only Upload My Own Form E?

What we do with your own Form E

A Form E is the comprehensive financial statement used in divorce and civil partnership proceedings in England and Wales. If you have completed one, uploading it saves you re-typing figures you have already gathered: SmartJudge reads it and pre-fills your answers for you to review and edit.

It is entirely optional. If you do not have one, or would rather not upload it, just fill in the form normally - nothing is withheld either way. The uploaded PDF is deleted once it has been processed, and the raw extraction is discarded rather than kept.

Why we will not touch your spouse's

A Form E is not an ordinary document. It is disclosure that a party is compelled to give, and it is given for the purposes of the proceedings and nothing else. That carries consequences: the other party’s copy is confidential to them, and disclosure in proceedings comes with an implied undertaking that it will not be used for a collateral purpose.

Feeding that document into a third-party tool to build your own case is exactly the kind of collateral use that can engage breach of confidence, following the line of authority most people know from Imerman. It is a risk to us, but far more importantly it is a risk to you - the party who handled the document, in your own proceedings.

So we took the decision out of your hands. There is no toggle, no attestation you can click through, and no support request that will unlock it.

The refusal is built in, not just written down

A policy that lives only in the wording of a page is a policy that gets ignored under pressure. This one is enforced in the software: the upload route rejects any attempt to submit a document as the other party’s, and the control that unlocks uploading requires you to confirm first that the document is your own.

We mention this not to sound strict, but because it is the honest answer to “could someone at SmartJudge do it for me?” They could not.

What to do instead

You do not need your spouse’s disclosure to get an assessment. Almost every question about the other party is optional and will not hold your report back:

• Enter what you know, and use a reasonable estimate where you can.
• Leave the rest - the report will note where the picture is incomplete.
• Come back and refine the figures as formal disclosure arrives. Your progress saves automatically.

There is more on working without their figures in what happens if you do not have your spouse’s information, and on why the report waits for a full picture in why you have to answer everything first.

If a copy of your spouse’s Form E has already come into your possession, speak to a solicitor about what you should do with it before you use it for anything. That is a question about your own position in your proceedings, and it is not one this page can answer for you.