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:

Continue reading »

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 »

A client recently paid me a very kind but rather unusual compliment.

“Every time I see you”, she said, “you smile at me – and it isn’t just any old smile, but a bright, confident one.”

Apparently my smile brightens her day and does wonders for both her confidence and her hopes for her case.

How nice is that? Apparently I was a smiley baby – and I have been smiling at people ever since. I always used to smile at people when I was a runner. In Yorkshire, my fellow runners always smiled back. Mind you, in London I used to get startled looks in response – and in New York I was stared at like I was a weirdo! So no more smiles there then…

The client’s comments made my day and gave me pause for thought, especially as she went on to add that she recently stopped going to a particular dentist because although the dentist was undoubtedly competent, she never, ever smiled. My client said that she always left the dentist feeling tense and sometimes miserable, not because of the treatment but because of the unsmiling dentist’s terse manner. I know the dentist to whom she was referring and I agree that she gives the impression of being overly serious. However I am equally certain that the dentist would be shocked and horrified if she knew that people thought of her in such a way.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was having a mug of coffee, relaxing after cycling a record (for me) 30 km on the Wattbike and throwing 16 kg kettlebells some 120 times!  I was reading about the presenter Selina Scott’s latest complaint against the BBC, whom she accuses of “blatant and sometimes malign ageism and sexism. I don’t agree. Continue reading »

This is the talk I gave at Staffordshire University’s Annual Family Law Seminar last week, about media and the family courts within the context of Human Rights legislation. I would like to thank Dr Sue Jenkinson, of Staffordshire University’s Law School, for inviting me to take part. I would also like to thank the academically-minded Andrea Essen of Stowe Family Law, for her tremendous contributions to this talk. I am grateful to both.

On Tuesday last week in the Stowe Family Law Cheshire office, I was able to deliver the outcome that a client had wanted for many months. Hard-fought cases are, by their nature, hard-won. Not every longed-for outcome can be handed over on a plate, and quite a lot of unseen skill can be required for the trickier aspects of a case.

I had advised our client to remain calm and patient; although he had done so, I know that it is easier to give such advice than it is to accept it. If it’s your case, then of course you are bound to worry. However if you have a competent lawyer, and you can see that things are going your way, the chances are that they will continue to do so. As I said to my client, if I had thought that we couldn’t deliver, I would have said so. Why put him through something hopeless? It isn’t my style and never will be.

It was a successful day and I left Hale feeling good. Wednesday and Thursday were spent in London, at the new Stowe Family Law London office (due to open later this year), Middle Temple and 1 Hare Court. On Friday, I was back seeing clients at the Stowe Family Law Yorkshire office.

By Saturday morning when I got up at 6 am, I felt quite exhausted. But the week wasn’t over… Continue reading »

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

We were sitting around the table at dinner in a restaurant in Eilat. This time of year is for family and friends, so there were lots of young people chatting away. As it turned out, quite a few were newly qualified lawyers, or trainee lawyers doing their compulsory two years internship with various law firms in the City. The talk turned to the challenges of putting “real life” law, as opposed to training and theory, into practice. At that point I asked about how the ethical courses they had received stood up to the rigours of legal practice in the real world.

One of my nieces told me that on her course, professional ethics had been one of the most intensive subjects of all, requiring a higher pass rate. Failure in that subject meant failing the entire course.

I’m not surprised. When I qualified as a solicitor, Lord Denning’s words at the admission ceremony have stayed with me all my life, and I have often repeated them in this blog. One of this country’s most famous judges of all time, Lord Denning was also Master of the Rolls, and therefore the person who signed my admission into law.

“Always do what is right in your head, and you will never go wrong”, he said. How right he was.

However I would, with respect, like to add another phrase. I hope it will help young trainees or newly qualified solicitors who, through sheer lack of experience, might be tempted to stray from “the straight and narrow” as we English people tend to say.

It is this: 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 »