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Oh dear. Nearly every mention of mediation in the media makes the same mistake, and now the Ministry of Justice is making it too. Announcing today an extra £10 million of Legal Aid to support mediation, the Ministry says: “In recent years a greater number of people have been successfully using mediation – where they
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A conversation with friends over the Christmas break brought home to me the risks you take if you get divorced without taking specialist legal advice. Amongst other things, my friends and their child (the person getting divorced) were unaware of: the factors that have to be present before a financial agreement can be binding,
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This is a subjective question, of course, and the only way you can answer it is to ask people what they think. A poll conducted recently by ICM for law firm Pannone has some interesting results. 2,000 people, some of them divorced and some not, were asked questions about divorce. Even among divorced people taking
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We may be a step closer to divorce finances being decided by reference to a formula. The formula would take into account factors such as the length of the marriage and the number of children. Read about it in this article in today’s Evening Standard
When your solicitor says something like “if you take this to final hearing it is likely to cost you another £10,000”, he is talking about the total costs involved: his own costs and the costs involved in instructing a barrister. The figure includes all preparation work, correspondence, meetings, conferences and court attendances. Is this stating
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Some couples get divorced but don’t sort out financial and property matters straight away. In a few cases they leave it till several years later. There is no requirement to deal with financial and property matters at the time of the divorce – the only rule is that the court isn’t allowed to make a
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28% of women over the age of 50 have no pension provision apart from the state retirement pension. The equivalent figure for men over 50 is 15%. 79% of married women say they did not discuss pension provision with their husband before they married. These statistics and others can be found in the Eighth Annual Scottish Widows
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Don’t assume that your spouse will continue to offer something that they have included in their latest offer. Just because this latest offer includes, say, a clean break, it doesn’t mean that if you go back with a counter offer your spouse’s next offer after that will still include a clean break – it may
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Try this summary of marriage and divorce in English law by Supreme Court Justice Lord Wilson. A fascinating read if you’re interested in legal history.
‘Custody’ as a legal expression went out when the Children Act came into force in 1991. Since then, what the court orders (if it orders anything at all) is simply who the child is to live with – a residence order. Since 1991 ‘access’ to a child has been ‘contact’ with a child. You still
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