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07 April 2021

Like many other aspects of everyday life, the family courts have been badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic and divorcing couples may find they must endure a significant wait if their case needs to go to court. However, as a way of hopefully reducing ongoing delays, the government has launched a £1 million voucher scheme for mediation services in England and Wales.

While family lawyers and divorce solicitors are largely in favour of alternative dispute options for separating couples in order to reduce the stress and, at present, adversarial nature of divorce cases, it is hoped that this incentive plan does not cause some parties to agree terms which are not in their best interests, particularly those with reduced income or reduced means of seeking income following a divorce.

19 March 2021

A recent survey by Direct Line Life Insurance revealed that 38% of respondents did not know where their partner or spouse held financial assets and 66% were unaware of where their parents held their wealth.

In a society increasingly turning to online and paperless services, this means that, when a loved one dies, the evidence of assets might be extremely sparse or even non-existent: the paper trail might not be there.

01 March 2021

A recent inheritance dispute case has provided another stark reminder about the court's view on parties who refuse to mediate, especially when the value of the estate is relatively modest. While each contentious probate and disputed Will claim is evaluated on its own merits, taking into consideration the individual circumstances of the claim, there are some overarching factors in such cases that courts agree on.

11 February 2021

The importance of seeking early family law legal advice and, where possible, settling non-contentiously – for example, via alternative dispute resolution such as mediation – has been brought to the fore by the latest estimates from HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) which show that it is likely to take around three years for courts to return to pre-Covid caseload levels.

Inevitably, this means that there is a significant backlog, and The Family Justice Board acknowledged as much when it indicated that it both needs to tackle “immediate pressures” and to initiate the process of implementing longer-term reform.

29 January 2021

The first working Monday of the New Year has, through the experience of divorce lawyers, come to be known as “divorce day”. This is because, typically, Christmas and New Year tends to bring struggling relationships to an inevitable and irreversible breaking point.

However, divorce day 2021 was always likely to be different to recent years because the lockdowns and associated pressures of 2020 had already resulted in many failing marriages to have ended.

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