Intelligent Divorce is an online service for divorcing couples (or for one half of a divorcing couple) which enables them to access high quality advice from a specialist family barrister at a reasonable price, without paying solicitors rates for the grunt work of gathering information. It is the brainchild of one solicitor (Mahie Abey) and one barrister (James Roberts at 1 KBW) and although in some respects it is very much a new way of delivering legal services, beneath the facade it is structured the good old fashioned way using technology to streamline and route information via solicitor and then on to a barrister – this is not a direct access project. This leads to a streamlined front end experience but an exquisitely complex set of T&Cs.

The information on the site is well thought through and clearly explained for non-lawyers. There is a very useful Guide which is worth reading even if you don’t ultimately use the service. The functionality on the site is excellent – I trialled account creation, inputting my information (don’t tell my husband) and testing out how it worked – it was very intuitive and well designed. Stage by stage you input your personal and financial information and circumstances which is collated by Intelligent Divorce before being passed on to the lawyers for advice. You pay a fixed fee, which is clearly explained and in return you get an advice from counsel for what seems like a very competitive rate.

Users can choose whether to go solo, providing all the information themselves and obtaining an advice for their own purposes, or working in tandem with the other spouse to obtain an impartial advice that both can use to work out how to settle their arrangements. 

As all lawyers know it is a prerequisite of all legal sector software that it must be (barely) functional, utterly unintuitive and visually dated (grey clunky boxes). Congratulations to Intelligent Divorce for bucking this trend. It is beautifully straightforward and I could find no glitches (if I had found any I would have been compelled to point them out in the same way that one is compelled to point out spelling errors).

So, in summary:

For couples divorcing – Intelligent Divorce is well worth consideration. It is a non-confrontational way for both of you to get some good advice for a very reasonable price. I would be very happy to get advice from counsel at 1 KBW for about £800 all in. And if you use the couples service they will draft your consent order for you. If you are able to use an online divorce service to sort out your divorce itself you could potentially sort out the whole chabang for under £2000. £2000 is a lot of money when you have none, but believe me this is cheap. Of course, if you use ID and don’t resolve things by agreement you may end up having to go through the court process anyway, but if you start the process well informed and with all your financial information to hand it would not be money wasted. (Cheeky plug – of course, if you do need to go to court you could always buy my book).

For lawyers – kick yourselves. Hard. Who needs ABS or direct access? This is just good lawyering, good client care and good business sense. Go and visit this website and ponder your own business development strategy. The future is upon us – there will be many many new business models, projects and innovations springing up all over the place and no doubt many will fail. My guess would be that this one will be successful – look carefully at this site and learn. It has been a thoroughly thought through project, and a vast amount of effort and planning has gone into it. Are you ready to compete?

This review is a guest post written by  Zoe Saunders, barrister at St John’s Chambers, Bristol. Zoe has particular expertise in cohabitation disputes, including applications for financial provision for children and trusts of land issues, and financial remedies on divorce. You can also find Zoe on twitter (@ZASaunders).

Financial Remedies Under the Family Procedure Rules 2010 by Singer, Mostyn, Marks & Smith 

This is a really useful book for anyone who does what we must now call ‘financial remedies’ formerly known as ancillary relief. The commentary on each chapter is likely to continue to be useful long after one has gained familiarity with the overall structure of the news rules and for those who are not yet familiar with the new FPR they are a really helpful guide to the most important changes.

The book is clearly laid out with commentary on the relevant sections of the rules preceding the rules themselves. It is a neat volume which is much more portable than the red book. It is clearly aimed at practitioners but does manage to balance adequate explanation without being excessively detailed.

Purchase of the book (£95 from Class Legal) also gives you access to the www.familyprocedure.com website which contains the full text and updates. One minor quibble is that it would be useful to see exactly what has been updated without re-reading the whole section, but other than that it is a useful resource and means that you can access the text without the physical book, which can be handy for when other members of chambers borrow it without asking! In my view although expensive I think this book is a worthwhile purchase.

@eGlance

We also got access to the @eGlance site for which you can get a discounted 12month subscription on purchase of the book (£30 off the usual £85 cost).

@eGlance suffers from two major flaws – the first of which is that it is not Apple compatible, which in the brave new world of ipads seems to me to be a really fundamental error and one which I think the authors / publishers really should get a grip on as soon as possible. The second flaw it that the user-interface looks like something which was designed 20 years ago and hasn’t been touched since.

In my view these two errors run the risk of putting off potential users, which would be a real shame, because once you get past the initial impression and start to actually use the software it is really pretty impressive. It has pretty much everything you could really ask for in a programme designed to help with anything from big money downwards. You can print off information and calculations and I suspect that it could become a really invaluable tool, if you can repress the urge to snigger every time you load it!

Both the Financial Remedies book and the @eGlance software can be purchased through Class Legal.

This review is a guest post written by  Jody Atkinson, barrister at St John’s Chambers, Bristol. Jody is instructed in both children and money cases, and has a particular interest in the trickier areas of family law, such as cohabitation and child support.

Safe Routes to Child Support: A Resolution Guide by James Pirrie, Benjamin Carter and Stephen Lawson (Resolution, 2011)

As this guide wisely points out, the law pertaining to the agency formerly known as the Child Support Agency (now calling itself C-MEC, but frequently continuing to use the Agency’s vast stocks of headed note paper), is an area that many family lawyers instinctively shy away from. This is because it is an alien landscape; decision makers operate on the basis of statutory formulas rather than wide discretions and disputes often end up before the specialist Appeal Tribunals rather than the more familiar courts.

At the present time, the two other guides to child support law are published by CPAG (the Child Poverty Action Group). The Child Support Handbook is part of the same series as the Welfare Benefits and Tax Credits Handbook and is aimed primarily at those advising benefits claimants. Ancillary relief solicitors may not find that it specifically meets their needs. Child Support: The Legislation, written by Upper Tribunal Judge Edward Jacobs, is the annotated statute book. This is essential for those who actually plan to contest tribunal cases before the Appeals Tribunal, but is not a text book, and will be utterly impenetrable to those who know little about child support law.

For most family lawyers I would unhesitatingly recommend the Resolution Guide. The first thing I would compliment it upon is its readability. The child support regulations are notoriously complicated and discussion of them can be very dry. The authors manage to inject some humour into what could otherwise be a dull read. The pre 2003 assessment formula, abandoned because of its unworkable intricacies, is described as ‘a thing of beauty’. This may be true, but it is a terrible beauty. As befits a Resolution publication, the authors remind the readers that family lawyers are practical creatures, and, rather than getting bogged down in the regulations, frequently return to exhortations not to lose sight of the reality of the situation for the clients. In the same practical vein, there are checklists, frequently asked questions, and sample letters and agreements towards the back of the book.

The book starts off with a helpful chapter about the inter-relationship between court orders and the Agency’s calculations. This is frequently misunderstood and is something that all ancillary relief solicitors need to know. Another useful chapter explains how Agency decisions are to be challenged. This is alien to county court lawyers, child support law has its own language of revisions, supercessions and variations. The time limits are tight and the approach required can be counter intuitive. Any solicitor approached by a client with an existing relationship with the Agency needs an understanding this area or they will get lost very quickly. I have been approached by solicitors who, frustrated by the obtuse nature of the Agency staff, are already contemplating judicial review. JR is, of course, the remedy of last resort, and thus rarely appropriate, especially when there is a costs free tribunal set up just to deal with child support claims. However, JR, and also less extreme methods of making a complaint, are dealt with towards the back of the book.

Overall this book, reasonably priced at £70, would be good addition to any family law practice’s shelf, and again shows the excellent service that Resolution provide to their members and to those involved the family law system.

This book is published by Resolution and can be purchased through their website here.

*screeches to a halt* Oh. In fact, since I started this post and whilst I was being waylaid with the construction of a skeleton argument about whether or not an adoption panel had made a valid decision and thus whether or not placement proceedings were valid (they hadn’t and they weren’t), John Bolch has beaten me to it with a second post.

It really is worth reading the post and the judgments – the Jones judgment lightened up our Friday afternoon in chambers last week no end. And it’s not often you can say that about a judgment of the Court of Appeal!

.

I confess that a member of St John’s I’m not 100% impartial, but nonetheless it promises to be a comprehensive update on the state of play for ancillary relief practitioners and is accredited for 6 hours CPD. Not bad for £100 + VAT.

.

To find out more and to book visit the St John’s Chambers website and download a conference programme and booking form or contact Sarah Tune (sarah.tune@stjohnschambers.co.uk).

.

Fork tongued husbands be warned…

.

My own parents routinely take our son for a day a week, but whilst for them they are pleased to feel they have helped us out with childcare, we are pleased to ensure that they have some quality time with their grandson. We try not to rely on it as failsafe childcare, being sensitive to when they have something else they need to do that day, but we would want to keep up this special time with grandma and granddad even when we aren’t at work. For my son Monday is Ga-mma day. It’s not a transaction we could quantify with money. That would be demeaning. I do see the arguments for being able to claim working tax credits childcare element if a grandparent is giving up a large chunk of their week and is prevented from earning money through other work (although I also see the difficulties with it), but to create maintenance obligations between different tiers of family members just undercuts the whole notion of family helping family – politicians are obsessed with trying to strengthen the family and ‘mend’ society, reducing the family to a set of financial obligations or contracts is not going to help cement our society together or make our children happier.

.

As a footnote, its heartening to see that what I would call a ‘marketing blog’ can still be an interesting read, and can contain some real and insightful opinion. If a blog is worth doing it has to contain some human input and not just be an endless stream of advertorial. Whilst Woolley and Co have clearly invested heavily in their online media marketing strategy, they are doing it well. So many other firms are doing it badly.

Given that this is the type of arrangement which springs up where traditional sources of funding are unavailable because of the unpredictability of a return on investment, this tells us something about the lack of legal certainty available to litigants in this area of law.

Still, its a problem most of us will never have. For most of us legal certainty means the sure knowledge that our fortune is so small it is scarcely worth the legal fees. I wish my spouse or I were wealthy enough for hedge funds to be interested in taking a punt on one of us should we ever fall out. You’ll excuse me for being such poor company – I’m still getting over the disappointment of having had four numbers in Saturday’s draw only to find that my other half had read out the numbers for Wednesday’s draw. Does that count as grounds for divorce? Can I run it as conduct? Anyone fancy my chances?