When I arrived back in the UK yesterday, I was surprised and delighted to discover that the Marilyn Stowe Family Law & Divorce Blog has been shortlisted for a Blawggie. Organised by Michael at Law Actually, the Blawggies 2010 are the UK’s first publicly nominated awards for legal blogs (“blawgs”). The shortlist includes categories for Best Newcomer, Best Legal Commentary and Triumph Over Adversity.

It is great to see old favourites such as Family Lore, Pink Tape and The Magistrate’s Blog nominated. along with some newer discoveries including Travis the Trout and Pupillage And How To Get It.

This blog has been shortlisted in the Blawg of the Year category; the public voting is now in progress and you can vote for your favourites here.

What’s the best way to attend a wedding? There must be a better way if, like me, you don’t particularly enjoy getting poshed up all day, making small talk with people you barely know, sitting ramrod-straight and getting up and down throughout the ceremony. Then of course you can virtually guarantee you will have the worst table by the kitchen at the wedding breakfast and like it or not you will put your foot in it, somehow with somebody, after a few drinks.

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to attend a wedding and not go through all that rigmarole, to just relax all the way through?  Especially during the best part: when you see the bride come down the aisle to be given away by her parents, about to start a new life with her partner.

This Monday I “attended” just such a beautiful wedding and, I think, in the best possible way! Let me explain…

It was 6 pm and the sun was setting behind the pale honey walls of the Old City of Jerusalem as Mount Scopus lay in the distance. I was standing high up on the balcony of our hotel watching a wedding scene taking place on the terrace below.  I could see the hustle and bustle of lorries and cars still thronging up the hill beyond as they entered the Old City through the Jaffa Gate. Alongside the gate stands King David Tower and there were still lots of tourists walking around the old Roman walls during this cooler part of the day.  I could see churches, synagogues and mosques spread across the city on rolling hills. Somewhere in the distance out of view is the Western Wall, all that remains of the Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and which stood on Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism. The wedding below me was taking place under a canopy facing towards the Western Wall.

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Further to my recent posts about savage cuts to family law legal aid in England and Wales, I would like to thank those who have contacted me or left comments, on this blog and on Solicitors Journal, with their thoughts.

I am pleased to learn that the Law Society, which represents the solicitors’ profession in England and Wales, has now notified the Legal Services Commission of its intention to seek judicial review of the family law tender process.

Linda Lee, president of the Law Society, has said: “As a profession, we accept and are proud of an ethical code that is higher than pure commercial considerations. We have a duty to protect the public interest. A reduction in access to justice cannot be in the public interest, particularly when it affects the most vulnerable people in society, those who are seeking to establish their basic rights”.

If an agreement with the Legal Services Commission and the Ministry of Justice cannot be reached, the Law Society will bring the proceedings before the High Court. Further details of the Law Society’s preparations can be found here.

Other developments:

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Cuts to family law legal aid, prenuptial agreements, Tchenguiz v Imerman… Regular readers will have noted that I hold some strong views about the latest family law developments and their implications for divorcing couples up and down the country. So when Solicitors Journal invited me to contribute an editorial about the “key issues facing family lawyers right now”, the biggest challenge was to fit everything within my allocated column inches! You may be pleased to hear that this family law blog gets a mention.

Justices are fiddling with top-dollar divorces while normal families burn, says Marilyn Stowe

I have never known a summer like this one. For a family lawyer it is like standing in no man’s land, with the ‘haves’ on one side and the ‘have nots’ on the other. In more than 25 years I have never seen family law riven by such manifest inequality.

At the height of the holiday season, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) has slashed the number of firms offering family law legal aid by 46 per cent – from 2,400 to just 1,300. Pity the legal aid family lawyer now returning from a hard-earned summer break. The charter flight was probably delayed; the lawyer was probably laden down with kids and suitcases. They get up early to go into the office and face the correspondence that always arrives when you are away. But this time that correspondence is far, far worse: the lawyer has been thrown out of a job.

The LSC is putting lawyers out of business with the swing of an axe, while telling the media that it is “putting quality of services above cost”. I am pleased that the public is not buying this glib argument. The truth is that for clients, particularly those from less well off or disadvantaged backgrounds, justice has suddenly become less accessible than it was. Now it will be about having the means, while an already overloaded service collapses into meltdown. In the meantime, how many tragedies will there be?  Continue reading»

Readers may have learned from the media about the scandal surrounding the savage cuts to legal aid in family law cases. If you aren’t aware of what has happened, please let me enlighten you. You will be shocked, not just by what has happened, but also by the arbitrary, and incomprehensible manner in which the Legal Services Commission (LSC), which runs the legal aid scheme in England and Wales, has acted.

In summary, the number of firms able to offer family law legal aid as a service to their clients has been slashed from 2,400 to 1,300. This is a travesty that calls for judicial review.

At the beginning of my legal career I used to work voluntarily, giving legal advice at the Citizens Advice Bureau in a very rundown area of Leeds. I did it because I knew from my mum, who worked there as a volunteer adviser, of the desperate need for free legal advice  - particularly for abused women who had nowhere to go with their children after assaults by their partners.  By chance one evening, I met a very good-looking young lawyer doing exactly the same thing, because he cared too. And as the phrase goes: reader, I married him!

With another young lawyer, Arthur Bateson, Grahame had set up a legal aid law office in Leeds. After our marriage, which we dashed into within weeks because we had fallen head over heels for one another, the three of us joined forces and began setting up branch offices, always in the less affluent area and always to help the most socially disadvantaged. And we loved it. Continue reading »

When I read the Imerman judgement, there is one passage that jumps off the page and startles me. It is this reference to a marital lifestyle:

“If a husband leaves his bank statement lying around open in the matrimonial home, in the kitchen, living room or marital bedroom, it may well lose its confidential character as against his wife. The court may have to consider the nature of the relationship and the way the parties lived, and conducted their personal and business affairs. Thus, if the parties each had their own study, it would be less likely that the wife could copy the statement without infringing the husband’s confidence if it had been left by him in his study rather than in the marital bedroom, and the wife’s case would be weaker if the statement was kept in a drawer in his desk and weaker still if kept locked in his desk.”

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but my twenty-first century family home does not have a separate study for the master of the house, let alone two for both master and mistress.

Perhaps we would review our floorplan if we were both working from home  - after all, we have our separate offices outside the home  – but frankly, I doubt it. The idea that there could ever be a private room in our house, for one spouse only, from which others are barred except by invitation is wholly alien to me. I suspect that it is alien to all but a few of you too. We are married and we have agreed to share our lives. Everything is shared, including our day-to-day finances and the rooms in our house. In any case and as with millions of other families in this country, our budget doesn’t run to private rooms.

However it seems to me that in the Imerman judgement, the concepts of separate studies and separate finances are not regarded as anything out of the ordinary. That this should be so in a leading judgement delivered by the Master of the Rolls, a judgement that will lead to disastrous outcomes for so many divorcing couples in this country, concerns me greatly. Continue reading »

A split hearing can be summarised as a hearing divided into two parts. During the first part the court makes findings of fact on issues identified by the parties or the court. During the second part the court, drawing upon the findings it has made, decides the case.

When a split hearing takes place, it is usually in the context of a contact or residence dispute between parents, with one party alleging domestic violence as a reason for refusing to allow contact with a child from the relationship.

Generally it has been the practice that the allegation must be dealt with, separately from the children matter, before the court can resume consideration of the contact or residence dispute. A split hearing can thus cause delay and expense for both parties – but change is in the air.

In one of his first announcements since becoming President of the Family Division in April 2010, Lord Justice Wall recently gave new practice guidance to judges and magistrates on the occasions when it is appropriate to direct a split hearing or conduct a finding of fact hearing in private and public law family proceedings. Continue reading »

This post won Family Lore’s Post of the Month Award for July 2010.

Yesterday the Court of Appeal made a landmark ruling that has been described as a “cheat’s charter”. You can read the details here. I must warn you in advance that this is a lengthy post; however I would like to explore the horrifying implications of this ruling for divorce cases up and down the country. We will begin with an ordinary couple, and we’ll call them Jim and Mary.

Jim is a postman. He is married to Mary, a factory worker on a production line who gets paid £250 in cash every week. He doesn’t know what she does with her money. Mary decides to divorce Jim after 25 years of marriage. She has started an affair with Fred, his best mate. Jim is distraught. Frantic, he comes across 10 bank books and some Premium Bonds buried under some papers she has kept in her drawer by the bed. There is no lock on the bedside drawer and after 25 years, Jim knows exactly where to look. He can see that Mary has been quite cute, and the bank books show that she has managed to save a total of £50k – every penny she has earned in her working life – while he has supported her and their children. He notices she has even had a few wins on the Premium Bonds, about which he never knew. Furious, he phones his solicitor John, to tell him what he has discovered.

“She has £50,000!” he tells John, totally shocked by the discovery. “Ten bank books, wins on the Premium Bonds – I never knew! She was living off my money and all the time she was squirrelling away her own. Can I bring a copy of everything that’s here over to you?”

This time two days ago John would have said of course you can. Today he can’t. Because if he does he may be opening himself up to a civil claim against him and his firm by Mary, for breach of confidence and more besides. He wouldn’t be receiving the copy documents innocently. He would know that Mary doesn’t know he has them. And he would know she wouldn’t be best pleased about it. So even though John is acting as a solicitor in Jim’s best interests and putting the best case he can to the court – which is what Jim is paying him for – Mary could sue him.

“I’m afraid you can’t bring copies over” he tells John. “And what’s more, you can’t copy the bank books – or anything else for that matter.” Continue reading »

As previously noted, many first-time visitors to this blog arrive here after typing their questions about divorce and family law directly into Google and other search engines. I also receive a number of reader enquiries via the comments section and the Contact Me page.

If you are a reader with a question about divorce and you would like a swift answer, join me on The Times website tomorrow (Thursday 29 July) for a Live Q&A during which I’ll be answering questions about all aspects of family law and finance.

If you prefer, you can submit your question in advance by adding it to the comments section on the website’s Live Q&A page. (The Times website is subscription-only, but can currently be accessed for £1 for 30 days.)

You can access the Live Q&A here. I will answer any question that you have, no matter how big or how small, so ask away!

UPDATE: it was a lively Q&A and you can view it here.