Securing costs against a Marathon spouse who never paid what he owed

The situation

'What happens if he just doesn't pay, like last time?' Heather asked that question in our very first meeting, quietly and without drama, and she kept asking some version of it through nearly every stage of the file that followed, no matter how many times we walked her through the process. She was not being dramatic or paranoid. She had lived through it before, from the outside, and it had left a mark on how much she trusted a piece of paper with a judge's signature on it.

Heather and Hassan had been married for over twenty years, most of them spent in Marathon, where Heather worked as a veterinary technician at a small local clinic and Hassan ran a side business that had, years earlier, been the subject of a separate and unrelated commercial dispute. In that dispute, Hassan had been ordered to pay costs to another party and simply had not, for long enough that the other party eventually gave up on collecting altogether rather than keep spending money chasing money. Heather knew this in detail because she had watched it unfold from the sidelines while they were still married, and she had quietly worried, even then, about what it revealed about how Hassan behaved once a court order stopped being convenient for him.

Now the two of them were separating, with a household income in the fifty-to-eighty-thousand-dollar range, one modest home they had bought together early in the marriage, and a property and support dispute that was shaping up to be genuinely contested rather than cooperative from the outset. Hassan's brother Omar had become involved from the periphery, offering to help Hassan cover legal costs and, more worryingly to Heather, encouraging him openly to fight rather than settle quickly, framing any compromise as a sign of weakness. The emotional temperature of the file was high from the very first exchange of letters, with accusatory messages flying between the two households well before any court date had even been set.

Heather did not want to win an ugly, drawn-out fight for its own sake. She wanted an arrangement she could actually rely on once it was signed and sealed. But she had seen firsthand, in that earlier dispute, that a court order meant nothing to Hassan if he simply decided not to comply with it, and she needed to know whether the law offered any real way to protect her from spending years chasing a judgment that turned out, in practice, to be worth the paper it was printed on and nothing more.

What the review found

A review of the earlier commercial dispute confirmed exactly what Heather remembered from the sidelines: a costs order against Hassan, entered years before their separation, that had gone unpaid for long enough that the other party eventually abandoned collection efforts as not worth the further expense. That history mattered directly to Heather's family law file, because a family court can order security for costs, an order requiring the other side to post money or another acceptable form of security up front, when there is a real, evidenced concern that a future costs award against them would go unpaid in the same way. It is an exceptional remedy the court reaches through its broader powers rather than a routine entitlement written into the family rules, and courts grant it sparingly; the more common response to a party who has already ignored a costs order in the same case is simply to stay that party's file until the arrears are paid, a step that was not yet available against Hassan because he had not yet ignored any order in this proceeding.

Security for costs is not something a court orders lightly or as a routine matter in every contested file. It is meant for situations where the evidence supports a genuine, specific concern, not simply because one spouse distrusts the other in general terms after a difficult separation. The documented history from the earlier dispute was exactly the kind of concrete evidence the rule contemplates: not a prediction based on personality or past arguments, but a demonstrated, verifiable pattern of ignoring a court's costs order once compliance became inconvenient and the consequences of ignoring it turned out to be manageable.

The review also surfaced something further worth noting. Hassan's disclosed finances, modest as they were overall, showed no obvious liquid assets beyond the couple's shared home that could easily satisfy a future costs order if he again chose not to pay voluntarily, the same practical problem the earlier creditor had run into and eventually given up on. That reinforced the underlying concern rather than easing it, and it gave the eventual motion a solid factual foundation that went well beyond Heather's personal history and feelings about him.

At the same time, the review made clear that the emotional escalation driven partly by Omar's involvement was making everything about the file harder and slower than it needed to be. Every routine procedural step was becoming an occasion for another round of accusatory messages between the households, and that dynamic threatened to turn a legitimate, well-supported protective motion into just another front in an increasingly personal fight, one that was making a fair, efficient settlement less likely rather than more. Getting the security for costs question resolved cleanly, and getting the file back toward something productive, required getting the temperature down first, not after.

What we did

1. Gathered documentation of the prior unpaid costs order from the earlier commercial dispute, confirming through public court records that the order existed and had gone unsatisfied, since a security for costs motion needs a solid factual foundation in evidence, not simply a spouse's recollection or word. That documentation, drawn directly from the court file rather than Heather's account alone, became the evidentiary backbone the whole motion rested on.
2. Reviewed Hassan's disclosed financial position carefully alongside that documented history, identifying that his assets beyond the shared home would likely be insufficient to satisfy a future costs award if he again chose not to pay, which strengthened rather than merely assumed the underlying concern driving the motion. That review confirmed there was no accessible pool of funds Heather could realistically draw on later if history repeated itself.
3. Brought a motion for security for costs early in the litigation, well before significant legal costs had accumulated on either side, so that if the motion succeeded it would actually protect Heather going forward through the rest of the file, rather than addressing costs already sunk and unrecoverable. Filing early meant the request could be assessed on the documented history alone, before the relationship between the parties had deteriorated any further.
4. Addressed the escalating communication separately from the legal motion itself, advising Heather to route all communication through counsel and consistently declining to respond in kind to accusatory messages, because a protective motion argued against a backdrop of visible high conflict is harder for a court to assess calmly and fairly. That single change measurably reduced the volume of hostile messages within the first few weeks.
5. Proposed a specific security amount tied to realistic anticipated costs for the remaining stages of the file, rather than an inflated or punitive figure, since a moderate, well-supported request reads as principled and is generally more persuasive to a court than one that comes across as tactical pressure dressed up as protection. That restraint gave the court a number it could adopt without having to discount it as posturing.
6. Negotiated directly with Hassan's counsel once tempers had genuinely cooled, using the pending, well-evidenced motion as leverage to open a broader settlement conversation about property and support, rather than allowing the file to proceed indefinitely as an all-or-nothing contest driven by Omar's encouragement. That shift in tone let both lawyers talk about a full settlement rather than only the security question in isolation.
7. Structured the eventual settlement to include a compliance mechanism, so that Heather's core underlying concern, being left holding an unenforceable order the way the earlier creditor had been, was addressed directly and explicitly in the final agreement rather than resting only on the earlier security for costs motion. That mechanism gave Heather a concrete way to enforce the ongoing terms if Hassan ever fell behind again.
8. Debriefed Heather after each procedural step to keep her grounded in what had actually been achieved rather than what Omar's running commentary suggested was happening, since managing her expectations honestly turned out to matter almost as much as the legal steps themselves. Those debriefs let her see for herself that steady, real progress was continuing despite the noise coming from the other side.

The outcome

The court granted security for costs, though at a lower amount than requested, taking a cautious and measured view of the documented history while declining to assume the absolute worst about Hassan's future conduct specifically in this file. It was a real result rather than the full number Heather had originally asked for, and it gave her something concrete and reassuring: a pool of money genuinely set aside that would actually be available if a future costs order went unpaid again, unlike the empty judgment the earlier creditor had been left holding.

The bigger shift in the file came after the motion was decided and the immediate financial question was settled. With the security question resolved and communication routed consistently through counsel rather than filtered through Omar's encouragement to keep fighting, the emotional temperature of the file dropped enough over the following weeks that a negotiated settlement on property and support became genuinely realistic for the first time. The parties reached an agreement that divided the modest home's equity and set ongoing support on terms both could reasonably live with, without a further contested hearing or the drawn-out litigation Omar had been pushing for.

Heather did not get everything she had initially wanted, either in the amount of security ordered or in some of the property terms she ultimately conceded to reach a full settlement rather than continue litigating. What she did get was what she had actually asked for in that very first meeting: a real, workable way to know that whatever was finally ordered or agreed would not simply be ignored the way it had been before, and a resolution that let her move forward without spending years chasing an unenforceable piece of paper.

What you can learn from this