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.

I was interested to read in The Times that a barristers’ chambers in London has set up a company that will arrange funding in divorce cases:

“Steve Jones, its business development manager, says: “It’s a way of reducing the balance between unequal parties where one has resources and one hasn’t — giving access to justice.”

“What is striking is that the set itself does not stand to gain directly from this venture. Divorce is not its area of expertise so it is referring the case to other specialist barristers and solicitors. It is acting as the middleman, or broker, arranging money with one of the 14 companies now providing what is called third-party litigation funding. “We don’t take a percentage or brokerage fee — we benefit in goodwill,” Michael Martin, the senior clerk, says. “Solicitors may refer cases on to us — it’s good old-fashioned rain-making.””

I believe that, contrary to what is stated, litigation funding is more generally available than is suggested in this article, at normal commercial rates from high street banks when clients need funding for their divorce. We don’t organise it; our clients do. However problems do arise with cases where the assets are very difficult to trace, or are offshore, or are in the husband’s name. Then banks are understandably reluctant to lend without security. In such cases a Sears Tooth Agreement may be appropriate. If not, and as a last resort, the husband may be ordered to pay out of his monthly income towards the wife’s costs. Continue reading »

Suppose that you are going through a very nasty financial case in the course of your divorce.

Suppose that your former spouse is behaving very badly during this process.

Suppose you both know that the court is likely to make the usual costs order in the case, with each side being asked to pay their own costs.

The party who decides to behave badly decides there is not much to lose. This party takes a gamble and increases their own costs in an effort to minimise the eventual settlement, safe in the knowledge that he or she will not have to pay the costs of the other side.

On the other side the frustration is clear. Costs are going through the roof and a nasty game is being played out. It is extremely difficult to find out what the opposing spouse is worth at all. Smokescreens and mirrors prevent anything other than a lengthy and convoluted legal process. The stronger spouse, confident the weaker one is getting nowhere, makes derisory offers.

It is pretty clear to all concerned that the intention (usually unspoken, but obvious nevertheless) is to rack up costs as much as possible, raise as many obstacles as possible to avoid disclosure, to avoid coming to the table and in general, to make life as hard as possible so that those derisory offers become more “palatable” as an end to this protracted saga.

This type of behaviour is not uncommon, especially when a spouse has much to lose. One of the worst examples I encountered recently was a client who told me her husband had telephoned the solicitor she had previously instructed, and personally threatened him and his firm with ruin if they touched her case. When she instructed another firm, he did exactly the same.

Suppose you are at your wits end, you are approaching court and you believe that you will ultimately succeed. However your costs have cleaned out all your savings. You desperately need to have your legal costs met, or your struggle will have been in vain. What can you do about it? How can you make the court depart from the normal “no order” principle?

Here is my advice: Continue reading »

One of the saddest realities of family litigation is that a death is not necessarily the end of the arguments. The majority of family litigation concerns a fair division of the property acquired during a relationship, and how to provide for the futures of a couple who have separated.  It includes how to look after any children that they have had together.  A small minority of cases, however, arise after somebody’s death.  Sometimes there are question marks over whether or not the Will left behind was properly executed.  More commonly, there can be an issue about whether or not the Will (or where there is no Will, the rules of intestacy) makes reasonable provision for the deceased’s family and dependants.

Of all the disputes we deal with, I have to say that these cases come close to being the saddest.  Only cases about the care of children consistently depress practitioners more.

There are two great myths about what happens with someone’s property after they die.

Myth 1 – Whatever is in the Will is sacrosanct.

“If you haven’t been left anything, there is nothing you can do.” Wrong!  1975 saw the passing of the catchily titled Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act.  Although it does not trip off the tongue easily, it is an important piece of legislation.  Parliament recognised that sometimes the Wills made by people, or the rules of intestacy when no Will was made, could simply be too harsh to the people left behind.  Why should a husband or wife of many years receive next to nothing at the deceased’s whim?  Why should somebody be left to depend on state benefits when actually there was plenty of money or property, but it was being left to somebody else?  One of the purposes of government is to deliver outcomes that are just and fair.  Parliament therefore acted to give the courts the power to deal with situations that were plainly unfair. Continue reading »

Local and national newspapers are filled with page after page of houses that are failing to sell. Those who don’t have to sell simply aren’t – it is a buyer’s market and the price a seller asks for is unlikely to be what they receive.  At Stowe Family Law we are witnessing how the recession-hit property market is affecting clients who are separating or divorcing.

Saturday’s Daily Telegraph confirmed that not only have prices which rose slightly in 2009 begun to fall back, but also that further falls are on their way and that there won’t be any upwards movement in the market for some time to come.

Many sellers, especially those going through divorce, seem to believe that their home is worth what it was two years ago when the market was still inflated. Divorcing couples have negotiated and reached a settlement based on a false premise and are coming unstuck when they realise that their property will not fetch the figure on which they based their agreement.

I have been compiling advice for those who are trying to sell property in a difficult market – see the list of tips at the bottom of this post. Continue reading »

We have in-house forensic accountants here at Stowe Family Law. Their valuable work means that when clients come to see us for the first time, we can provide immediate advice about the likely scale and nature of a case. Our forensic accountants can also provide advice about the likely value of a client’s business for the purpose of a divorce.  This is useful because business values may be artificially inflated or deflated by the client, for a variety of reasons.

It is relatively unusual for a family law firm to have in-house forensic accountants, and our clients prize this service. In general, the demand for it appears to be increasing.

Financial Times journalist Jane Croft recently interviewed Nick White, the head of our forensic accountancy department, about high profile divorce cases and tracking down hidden assets. Extracts from the published feature appear below.

A model for breaking up

By Jane Croft

With so much at stake in big-money divorce cases, it is perhaps not surprising that there is often suspicion that some husbands are “hiding” their wealth so it cannot be included in any divorce settlement.

In these situations, divorce lawyers are turning to a small circle of specialist forensic accountants who can value a couple’s wealth and investigate allegations of non-disclosure. This can include tracing assets through a web of offshore locations to work out whether someone is underplaying their own net worth to win a cheaper settlement. Continue reading »

Last summer I visited Porto Ercole in Tuscany, Italy. There, I reflected on some recent family law cases – and the lack of change in human nature since the time of Caravaggio, who died on the rocky beach I was visiting and is buried nearby.

Caravaggio was a master of human nature, which he summarised ably in his paintings. No-one knew more than he of the flaws in the human character, which can lead to profound suffering. He inflicted suffering, and suffered for it. He lied, cheated, gambled and murdered. He was wracked with guilt thereafter, yet left a peerless legacy to the art world: some of the most descriptive, moving and greatest paintings ever produced. Caravaggio knew the nature of torment.

It is 400 years since he died and until 10 January this year, the Borghese Gallery in Rome exhibited some of Caravaggio’s artwork together with that of 20^th Century artist Francis Bacon. Another artist who has been called “a tormented painter”, Bacon has also been  described as “one of the most anguished artists of the 20^th Century”. He had a fascination with the Crucifixion and an open mouth, a Scream. These two artists were featured together: they may have lived four hundred years apart but according to Anna Coliva, the director of the Borghese Gallery, they are “linked by a deep suffering for the human condition and an internal sense of devastation”. It was quite an exhibition. Immensely moving and thought-provoking, it was a stunning success.

Shortly after the Rome exhibition ended, a case called K v L resurfaced in the English courts. It is the same case that troubled me when I was in Porto Ercole, and about which I wrote at the time. It concerns a convicted paedophile who attempted to claw a share of his former wife’s fortune. Unable to bring herself to face him in court, she had resorted to giving evidence through a video link-up.

The husband subsequently attempted to appeal an order in the ancillary relief proceedings, and his application was heard in the Court of Appeal a few weeks ago. This case continues to trouble me. Why must the wife be the tormented one of the pair? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Continue reading »

Some recent, and surprising, court decisions from offshore jurisdictions, namely Bermuda and Jersey, demonstrate the fluctuating levels of cooperation that the English family courts can expect to receive in divorce cases.

In English divorces when there are offshore assets, often held in offshore trusts, it is common for wives to meet with resistance when they try to find out information about those assets or trusts from their husband.

One way of remedying this is by issuing Letters of Request. These are letters from an English court to the appropriate authority (usually a court) in the other jurisdiction requesting information about the assets or trusts held in that country. The letter is written by your solicitors, who then apply to the English court for its approval and to request that it is sent. The English court can, and frequently does, amend the content of the letter.

After receiving the letter the authority in that other jurisdiction can choose to do three things: Continue reading »

In my previous post I set the scene in a hotly disputed area of law: maintenance payments and the ex-husband who resents paying after his former partner begins living with another man.

The Court of Appeal has issued a judgement (Grey v Grey (2009EWCA Civ1424)) that should help to resolve this grey area, even though it will mean wives who choose to cohabit could stand to lose their maintenance. Put starkly, in line with changing social attitudes the pendulum has swung away from dependent wives. They may now be faced with very tough choices post-divorce: do they live with someone, or keep their maintenance?

Grey v Grey

This case involved a wealthy couple in their thirties, whose 10-year marriage had produced one daughter. When they divorced the capital was divided equally between them, and the judge set Mrs Grey’s maintenance at more than £100,000 per annum.

The husband subsequently appealed this award, on the basis of his ex-wife’s relationship with a man called Mr Thompson. The wife hotly contested the claim that she was cohabiting. Unfortunately for her, she lived on the same street as her former in-laws. Mrs Grey’s former father-in-law and an enquiry agent carried out observations which showed she was indeed living with him, a fact that she persistently denied through her solicitors and later in court.

Worse still for Mrs Grey was that her former husband had also discovered that she was pregnant. His legal team ambushed her with this revelation during cross-examination in court. She admitted her pregnancy and that she was “in a fixed, committed relationship” that was permanent in nature. (At which point I can imagine her legal team fiddling with ties, looking intently at blank bits of paper and staring, stony-faced, into the distance!)

Continue reading »

Your ex-wife has moved on and is now happily living with a new partner. They are in a stable, supportive relationship and he doesn’t seem short of cash. So why are you still paying her regular maintenance?

Maintenance payment is one of the most divisive issues in family law. Over the course of two posts I’m going to consider why maintenance orders exist and the emerging case law which means they might be more readily challenged in the future.

Most financial settlements between divorcing couples consider only the “reasonable needs” of the parties involved. They or the court will share out the assets – capital and income – ‘fairly’ so they can both cope financially as they move forward with their new lives. In such cases, there often isn’t any surplus money to fund a “clean break” between them. The wife has no income, or earns far less than the husband, and so needs maintenance payments from her husband to support her. Sometimes these payments have a cut-off point in the future, by which time the wife is expected to be self-sufficient, but often the order is left open-ended because she has care of the children, or has no realistic prospect of earning a reasonable living in the future – or both.

Maintenance therefore remains payable by an ex-husband to his ex-wife, often with an automatic uplift linked to the Retail Prices Index, until the wife remarries, dies or the court makes a further order. Until then she receives tax free maintenance, which she regards as the income earned as a result of their marriage.

This doesn’t happen in mainland Europe, there maintenance is not payable to an ex-wife. She is expected to manage with an equal split of matrimonial assets and if necessary go to work. The husband keeps his income intact save for child support payments. There is no doubt that this causes great financial hardship, and in England the law recognises this fact and provides accordingly.

But suppose both parties move on with their lives and they both acquire different partners?

Continue reading »