Legal ombudsman gives good advice to divorcing couples - shock horror!

A week or so ago, the Legal Services Ombudsman published a report on complaints against lawyers.  Sadly, family law is a major contributor to his case load.  Am I surprised?  Not greatly.  I encounter a good number of indifferent family lawyers.  I have the privilege of presenting training courses for BPP, one of the leading national training organisations, which gives me the opportunity of discussing and passing on to other family lawyers my main concerns.  As is clear from the report, clients are deeply concerned about costsand this is a major source of complaint.  I believe that is all too often insufficient focus by both solicitor and client on managing cases to keep cost to a minimum.

The great news for professional and client alike is that the Ombudsman has published a highly sensible guide to getting the most out of a professional relationship between solicitor and client.  You can find it at this link:

Using a divorce lawyer - ten helpful tips

So I thought I'd have a look at the tips the Ombudsman gives, one at a time, of course.

Tip one.
Consider what you want from the legal process - AND BE REALISTIC!
Sorry to shout but this is important.  The biggest single dispute in divorce usually concerns money.  Your money.  The more of your money you spend in legal fees, the less you get to keep.  Very often a solicitor will be telling a client something the client doesn't want to hear.  The law does not punish one spouse for being bad, nor does it set out to reward the other for being good.  The purpose which the court sets out to accomplish is simply to enable the couple to live separately from each other.  It's a matter of arithmetic and it's a matter of practicalities.  For those who are deeply hurt, this is not what they want to hear.

And that's where problems can arise.  A client can put a lawyer under severe pressure to try to obtain an outcome which is just not achievable.  When costs get racked up and that outcome is dismissed as unrealistic, the client complains.  Both client and solicitor may have to share the blame.  The client has not been prepared to accept good advice.  The solicitor may have been intimidated by the client and persuaded into presenting a case which is just not viable.  Solicitors must have the courage to withstand pressure and be the bearer of bad news if need be.

Where I become decidedly irritated is when I am faced with a solicitor who is doing work which cannot benefit their client but for which someone - quite often the taxpayer, under a legal aid certificate - is paying.  The classic example for me is the lengthy and purposeless questionnaire.  For instance, if the only asset of a marriage is a house and neither spouse can realistically be ordered to pay maintenance to the other, questions about how either of them spends their income are entirely irrelevant.  You can spend hours crafting such a questionnaire but it has no value to the client.  It can be decidedly embarrassing when a judge looks at your questionnaire and simply dismisses it out of hand.

Fighting for what you can't get is emotionally draining, ultimately devastating and a waste of money.  If that's your position, your solicitor is doing you the biggest and most altruistic favour by telling you early on, before the damage is too great.




Blog Disclaimer: Nothing in www.austinkempfamilylaw.blogspot.com blog should be construed as legal advice. If you require legal advice upon any family law related matter then you should instruct a solicitor. Any links to other blogs or web sites are provided for convenience only and Austin Kemp Solicitors cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of such linked blogs/sites.

Now an award winning divorce lawyer!

I've often noted, with a cynical sneer, those businesses who insist on calling themselves award winning.  Lawyers, of course, are not immune to this form of vanity publishing.  They hold their own private awards dinners at which they honour each other in sometimes abstruse and downright arcane categories.  The Oscars for legal geeks, but without tributes to make up artists!  I suppose that if I were awarded something by my industry peers, I'd suddenly lose my cynicism and take pride in the fact that members of my own profession held me in conspicuously high regard - but that hasn't happened yet.  Shame.

However, this weekend I was honoured by the people who count far more than your professional peers - the sort of people who actually use the professional services of divorce lawyers.  So if you look at the following link, you should find me fairly easily - I'm the one called jonathancj, obviously.

 Wikivorce awards

What's Wikivorce all about?

Wikivorce came about when its founder went online to look for information to help him with his own divorce and found himself having to put together fragments of information from a variety of sources.  He decided that it would have been far more helpful if they had all been in one place and set himself the task of constructing that resource.  Quite quickly it moved from being just an encyclopedia of information to a community of people talking about what they had learned from their own relationship failures and passing on useful information.  The great benefit of this is that it has moved to being more of a tailored advice service, albeit informal in nature, rather than leaving it to individuals to try to apply generic information to their own specific circumstances.  It does not hold itself out as giving legal advice but most of the members of the site have themselves experienced separation and can help with the emotional side of the separation as well as the practical side.

And why is it important?

At the awards dinner, the site founder highlighted the effects of the withdrawal of legal aid from family law.  More and more people will be trying to negotiate quite a complex web of law and procedure without the aid of a specialist who is familiar with how it all fits together.  Where on earth can they turn?  How can they learn what to expect at a first hearing?  Is mediation really a good idea?  What is a hearing really like?  Who can they ask these questions when they simply cannot afford to pay a solicitor to advise?

For so many questions, the internet is the first port of call now.  You're thinking about a major purchase?  Google product reviews.  You have a technical question on any particular topic?  Google it.  Search for help with divorce and the first page of the results will bring up Wikivorce and you have access to a community of people happy to help and with first hand experience.  No, it can't substitute for the direct help of your own solicitor.  For the best level of help, you need someone like me.  But if that's just not an affordable option, Wikivorce will stand in the gap.  It remains the case that the helpful people online will often advise other users that they really need to get a solicitor - there's a limit to what they can do to help - but there's no doubt at all that people using the site will be much better prepared for the procedure than those who try to go it alone.

Blog Disclaimer: Nothing in www.austinkempfamilylaw.blogspot.com blog should be construed as legal advice. If you require legal advice upon any family law related matter then you should instruct a solicitor. Any links to other blogs or web sites are provided for convenience only and Austin Kemp Solicitors cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of such linked blogs/sites.