ITs been reported this week that the number of care proceedings issued in the London area is down by 30% since the Public Law Outline Pilot began, the Government in press releases and the FLBA in its recent members email both speculate that this may be down to an increase in placements with extended family. OF course the concern of many, including the FLBA is that the reasons may be to do with resources rather than best interests.

This coincides with the pilot of the Family Drugs and Alcohol Court pioneered by District Judge Crichton  at the Inner London Family Proceedings Court (reported in the press several months ago, but the subject of a detailed article in this month’s Counsel Magazine). FDAC is a voluntary scheme which provides parents of children in the care system with the opportunity to undergo therapy and treatment in order to deal with their substance abuse problems, with the goal of reuniting parent and child and avoiding permanent placement elsewhere. This seems like an excellent scheme, as resources targeted at parents are scarce - parents will rarely be funded by local authorities to undergo treatment, and whilst some support is available through the NHS, waiting lists mean that help via this route comes too late to affect the outcome of the care proceedings. The pilot is funded jointly by central government and three London Boroughs, but it is difficult to assess what scope there would be to finance an FDAC more widely if it proves successful - it is early days and no doubt stakeholders will want to see that they are getting value for their money.

The irony of this pilot is that, notwithstanding the current trend for pre-proceedings intervention and problem solving encompassed in the PLO, this vital parental support is not available and cannot get underway until proceedings have been commenced. It would be a terrible shame if parents who could otherwise benefit from this type of support were unable to access it because proceedings are not issued early enough. In an ideal world resources of this kind need to be available before matters have reached the threshold for care proceedings, but where the impetus for such pilots is from within the judiciary as it is here there is of course no power to affect the system prior to the court’s involvement.

One hopes that parents - and children - do not fall between two stools here: by the time proceedings are issued matters may be past the point where this pilot could help. Hopefully the fact that the Local Authorities who are working with the families involved are also investing financially in the pilot means that there will be a degree of joined up thinking so that this is avoided. Of course, the premature issue of proceedings simply in order to enable a parent to access the FDAC resources would be wrong for other reasons.

Although the details of how and why are yet to emerge, the news about Mark Saunders’ death is quite shocking for those of us at the family bar, which is a relatively small community. However, I don’t intend to speculate about what has happened - it is undoubtedly a very private tragedy for both Mark Saunders, his wife and his family. This post is not about Mark per se, but just about a train of thought it has prompted.

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A friend and fellow family barrister remarked to me yesterday about the massive amounts of press coverage of this news today and about coverage of the bar in general (I paraphrase): You see: we DON’T all have it easy. We aren’t just very clever fat cats living it up with fast cars and easy lives. Her point was twofold: firstly that we are misunderstood by the general public and secondly that the reality is an extremely stressful and pressurised existence, and its not surprising if sometimes we crack under pressure. Of course, I don’t know if the death of Mark Saunders arose in any way from the stress of the job, but my friend is right about the general point: We may have a reputation for being intellectual whizzkids who can solve any problem, but many barristers are not so ’genius’ when it comes to managing real life and relationships - even those of us who specialise in family work. Solicitors often joke about how socially inept many barristers are and I am sure there is some truth in it (although I like to think family lawyers tend to posess a few more social skills than those who specialise in some of the dryer, more black letter areas of law).

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Family barristers and solicitors take on a huge responsibility for attempting to sort out the messes people have made of their lives, their finances, their children’s upbringing. Counsellors or therapists receive their own support or therapy (’supervision’) to help them process the emotionally draining encounters they have day in day out - barristers in this field spend all day every day dealing with unhappy people with wrecked lives or damaged relationships and yet receive no emotional or psychological support. We just get on with it.

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I’m quite sure that for many of us working in this field the general pressure of the job - coupled with first hand experience of just how awful relationship breakdown can be and just how extensive the consequences of both the breakdown and the litigation can potentially be - makes us highly likely to cope either extremely well or extraordinarily badly when it actually happens to us.

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I’d guess most of us would EITHER

• be able to take the benefit of experience, heed our own advice and avoid the expense and heartbreak of litigation,

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• would be completely unable to see the wood for the trees (like many clients).

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I imagine barristers at this end of the spectrum could well be paralysed by the realisation that they were going to end up just as tortured and depressed as those unhappy clients - weary, penniless and washed up. They don’t all end up badly but we know how bad the worst case scenario can be. And being objective about other people’s crises is far easier than being objective about a relationship breakdown that you are mired in yourself. Most of us have worked and continue to work extremely hard to get to the bar and achieve a degree of financial stability if not prosperity - all of that is at risk - it must be galling that one’s own expertise is no protection. Going through the court process as litigant surrounded by your own colleagues and friends would of course be the final indignity.

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AND what’s more, being a barrister is really a very antisocial occupation. Long and unpredictable hours, a tendency to attract or create people with either an excess of self confidence or a (well-hidden) complete lack of self belief, and a need to put the trial before that important anniversary, birthday party or school play. Perhaps thats why so many barristers marry other barristers. Who else would want to live with us?

It’s hard to reach this keyboard with the babber in a sling on my chest…but darn it that’s not the toughest thing I’ve done in the last 3 weeks…Quick - while he’s sleeping - BLOG a BLOG…

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Sigh…It’s hard to keep track of events in the legal world when I am (quite literally) drowning in pooey nappies and permanently attached to a sucking machine…But that’s not the toughest thing I’ve done in the last 3 weeks…I have my own family blog subject right here, sleeping in front of me. 

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So I guess the question is: has motherhood brought me new insight into the plight of my clients? Only time will tell I suppose, and lets face it whilst these first three weeks have been pretty INTENSE I’m guessing there is a WHOLE lot more to parenthood than I have so far experienced first hand. But there are a couple of things that were blindingly obvious right from the moment he popped out (that’s such a misleading phrase, as if it’s as quick and easy as popping a cork):

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Firstly: I never subscribed to the view that first hand experience of parenthood is a pre-requisite for practice at the family bar. And I still don’t. But what I do think I will have when I go back to work is a deal more insight into why ‘what happens to the kids’ makes people act so darn CRAZY when they separate. They take you over these little people, systematically drain all your time, your capacity for interesting conversation or intellectual activity, and render you emotionally captivated. Nothing is ever the same. I knew it would be this way and yet I didn’t really understand it.

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And secondly I think also I will have far more empathy for parents in public law (care) cases in future. It is so HARD looking after such a tiny tiny person 24 7. I’m a woman of a solid family background, good education, and relatively intelligent BUT - even when I’ve planned my pregnancy and taken time to read all the books and websites, absorbed my parents own parenting style, taken advice from everyone I can think of…even when I’ve got a healthy and relatively (I think) undemanding baby, and a fantastically supportive husband and family to help me out - this three weeks has been the hardest I have ever worked. It is easy to see how people find it hard to manage, particularly where they are single parents or have more than one child. In fact I wonder at the moment how young single mums ever manage - those that do must have some remarkable strength of character. I suspected it before but now it is plain to me that many of us ‘good enough’ parents would also fail if put in the same dire circumstances as some of the poor parents we see struggling in the care system - isolated, unsupported, broke - how would you cope? I wouldn’t.

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I end here both because I’m running out of my brain power reserves and because he who must be obeyed is waking for a feed….ttfn

Wow. Rock on Mr Justice Coleridge! Coleridge J opened the Resolution Conference last week with a speech that is considerably less diplomatic than many a judicial utterance. He says early on in the speech: “I have not discussed this talk with the President let alone shown him a copy in advance. (I did not want to do so for fear that he might ask me to tone it down a bit). And just at the moment I am not in the mood for toning things down”. Perhaps if he had run it past the Pres it might never have seen the light of day, but I’m glad that it did.

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Accordingly, the text of Coleridge J’s speech to Resolution last week can be found here in full: resolution-press080404. If you want to read some commentary you can visit the Laws of Love blog which beat me to it. All I need say is that everything Coleridge says rings true with my experience, is entirely sensible and ought to be (IS) self evident, particularly the short-sightedness of underfunding the family justice system and treating it like a poor relation.

another one has popped up as of April fool’s day: Lawsoflove.

What can I say about this game? Most definitely ‘No Comment’. (Thanks to Maryland Divorce Legal Crier for the link)

Oh how true…This post from the Maryland Divorce Legal Crier blog is no less relevant for being from across the pond. It paints an all too familiar picture of the cringeworthy correspondence files I often get sent with my briefs. It makes me want to weep! Its easy enough to get drawn into a pointless bun fight but really guys - get a grip!!

I confess to not fully understanding this piece of gizmotastic wizardry, but I think its a kind of glorified super-feed with a catchy name. Whatever it is, the FamilyLawPipe appears to feature my face on it and is driving people to this blog. I must explore this newfangled pipery properly at some stage… In the meantime I have managed (with a small amount of assistance from the Geek on the sofa) to insert a borrowed Pipe thingybob on my sidebar for your delectation - thanks Nick Holmes.

Yuk yuk yuk. What an obnoxious woman! I had the misfortune last night of watching ‘Mums who leave their kids’ last night on telly, a ‘documentary’ by Jane Moore a writer for the Sun. I say documentary, but in fact this was really just an opportunity for Jane Moore to pour forth a whole load of misogynist bull about women who do not conform to a particular stereotype of womanhood or motherhood - opinion without a balanced journalistic investigation to back it up.

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The show has aired before on Sky and has met with a similar response from other viewers (in 2006 and in response to yesterday’s showing).

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One of the programme’s core propositions was that there are two types of women - those who have it ‘in them’ to abandon and those that don’t i.e. good / proper women and mothers (like Jane Moore and her perfectly manicured lady friends) and aberrant bad women with some kind of inherent defect. The show seemed to me to be an exercise in reassuring Jane Moore and women like her that they were different from the awful women who were pilloried in the programme, more than it was a genuine attempt to understand why women are driven to take this extreme action.

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The programme was based upon the proposition that the Mother-Child relationship is somehow more significant than the Father-Child relationship, and that there was something unnatural in the breaking of that Mother-Child relationship by abandonment that did not apply to absent Fathers. Any parental abandonment must be heartbreaking and damaging for a child, but can we really say more than that abandonment by a primary carer is more awful than that of a less involved one? What is it about women’s abandonment of their children that rendered Jane Moore so utterly unable to understand her fellow women? I suppose the difficulty is that if one really explored all the myriad reasons why a mother might feel she had to leave her children, if one really understood that women may leave because of depression, mental health difficulties, violence, loss of self-confidence in her ability to parent, as a temporary arrangment which becomes for reasons outside her control permanent, or simply to reduce the conflict in the family home in times of relationship difficulties….if one really understood and accepted that these ‘environmental’ factors can affect any women (or any man) - one might then have to accept that it could be you. You could be one of those BAD mothers.

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Moore briefly flirted with the idea that postnatal depression might explain some of the unfathomable behaviour of the mothers who commit this sin of abandonment, but her obvious viewpoint from the outset as confirmed at the end of the show was that this was simply an excuse for selfish women who weren’t prepared to martyr themselves in the way that proper mothers like Moore were doing.

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The saddest thing in this programme was the lack of insight, the lack of solidarity, and the inability to admit that all mothers, all parents, are human and flawed and can buckle under the pressure of parenthood or difficulties in the home. The turning of her back in order to protect her own sense of self was truly depressing. Where do women like Jane Moore go for support when they are struggling with motherhood, for they surely don’t talk to their friends? The inability to perceive one’s own potential vulnerability is in itself a risk factor.

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And of course only just below the surface was the evident belief that the reason that Fathers are less important than Mothers - we simply accept that Mums pick up when Dads abandon and that abandonment by dads is simply a fact of life, but the premise of this programme is that abandonment by Mums is of a whole different order. That devalues Dads and oversimplifies the explanations for female abandonment.

Well, we all knew there would be some kind of appeal - and apparently it is by way of Heather Mills McCartney appealing the decision to make the full judgment public, due to be heard tomorrow. In the meantime here is a link to the summary of the judgment published today.

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In short, Heather Mills McCartney was awarded £24.3m inclusive - far far less than asked for and quite substantially less than some pundits had suggested. Paul apparently has an asset base of £400m. The award was based primarily upon need. This may have been a case involving extraordinary wealth, and for most of us £24m is in itself an extraordinary amount of money, but this was never going to be a case where anything like an equal sharing of assets was imposed, not least because the majority of the wealth in question was presumably treated as non-matrimonial.

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I know it doesn’t make for very good blog posting but I for one am relieved at the possibility that we may yet be spared the revolting prospect of picking through the entrails of the Mills-McCartney marriage, and of the media attacking Heather Mills-McCartney regardless of the merits of the case. In fact, even if the judgment is published in full, as Bennett J proposes (subject to what the Court of Appeal has to say about the matter) it is likely to be in neutral terms and confined only to what is strictly relevant to the s25 exercise. Given that we are told in the judgment summary that the Judge declined to hear evidence on issues of conduct one hopes there will not be too much for the press to get their teeth into, but no doubt they will suck the marrow from the very bones of the judgment in order to get one last story or insinuation out of it.
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What I’d like to know is who was responsible for the leak of the draft judgment last week that suggested in round terms that Heather was going to be awarded around £25m, bearing in mind that such judgments would usually only be circulated to the legal teams involved (or in Heather Mills McCartney’s case to herself as a Litigant in Person)? And more importantly, was anybody castigated by the Judge for such behaviour when judgment was handed down?
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UPDATE: lunchtime Tues. Heather Mills McCartney’s application for leave to appeal has been rejected by a 2 judge Court of Appeal. The judgment has been published in full - I have not had time to read it as I have to rush out and deal with more pressing matters (yes such things do exist), but you can find the pdf document here. All I can tell you (and make of this what you will) is that the word ‘unreasonable’ appears 16 times, ‘conduct’ a staggering 108, ‘contribution’ 19 times, ‘exaggerated’ 5 times, and ‘ridiculous’ once. ‘Husband’s case’ appears 8 times, whilst ‘wife’s case’ appears 20 - perhaps an indicator of a certain amount of judicial appeal-proofing going on? ‘evidence’ raises 76 hits, the one which caught my eye being at pa 16 where Heather’s evidence is described as inconsistent, inaccurate, less than candid and Heather as a less than impressive witness. Oops.
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I fancy I shall enjoy reading this later on, in spite of my noble protestations about the media frenzy above. Well, its been published now - it’d be rude NOT to read it, no?

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I shall enjoy reading this later on, in spite of my earnest protestations above.

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FURTHER UPDATE (Fri 28 Mar) Do you know what - in fact I STILL haven’t read the darn thing. Frankly, I can’t be bothered. I’ve heard it gutted on the radio ten million times and I’m utterly bored bored BORED with the whole caboodle.