About to email your divorce lawyer? Read this before you press “send”.
One of my jobs at Stowe Family Law is to carry out file reviews. Every month I pore over each file’s contents, read the correspondence, look at the documents and think long and hard about the best course of action for that case. It is a task that many lawyers loathe, because of its intensive nature, but it has to be done.
I have noticed that the amount of email correspondence continues to increase. This may be because our clients are scattered far and wide – our International Family Law Department is particularly busy at the moment; we are also seeing plenty of new clients from London and the South East – but it certainly appears that emails are here to stay.
Email has its advantages, but also creates challenges. Face-to-face meetings, which I far prefer, tend to give us all the chance to air our thoughts in more detail and in “real time.” Emails usually refer to one point in the entire case, and so make it easy to ignore the bigger picture.
If you are currently going through divorce, remember to use email wisely and respect the power that it has to change a situation, swiftly and suddenly. One Stowe Family Law client was libelled by his wife to the entire staff of an international organisation by email. It cost her dearly in the divorce – and nearly cost him his job.
With that episode in mind, I thought I would list ten pointers on email correspondence for the benefit of those who are going through divorce, or considering it. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but does include examples of the potential pitfalls of email and how best to avoid them:






This is the view of the River Lune from the cemetery in Kirby Lonsdale, Cumbria, North West England. The great art critic and social thinker
“Our society in England and Wales now urgently demands a second attempt by Parliament, better than in the ill-fated Part II of the Act of 1996, to reform the five ancient bases of divorce; meanwhile, in default, the courts have set the unreasonableness of the behaviour required to secure the success of a petition on the second basis, namely pursuant to s.1(2)(b) of the Act of 1973, even when defended, at an increasingly low level.” – Wilson LJ in
The latest UK divorce statistics show that a marriage ending in divorce has, on average, 

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