Prince Charles (as he then was) once popularised the phrase 'grey goo' (Explained and Americanised by Wikipedia as 'gray goo'). He wasn't actually talking about AI but about nanobots. AI was merely a twinkle in a tech-bro's eye at that point, but it sometimes it feels apt to describe the waves of samey AI junk we are all wading through, like so much verbal treacle. A colleague sent me this interesting looking article on the increasing use of AI in US Courts by pro se litigants (that's litigants in person or people without lawyers to UK lawyers and normal humans respectively): Access to Justice in the Age of AI:Evidence from U.S. Federal Courts I confess, because screens, the internet and social media have rotted my brain and destroyed my concentration span*, I haven't read it in full, but it is on my 'read it properly soon' reading list, and it chimes with what I think we are all seeing on the ground in our own practices over here. The immediate response from colleagues who were cc'd...

Every time I have to explain to a youthful colleague what something now defunct was and how it used to work, I feel a little bit older... This week I thought someone was mistakenly evangelical about the new marketing idea that is corners. (corners being the little cleverly die cut pieces of card, showing a chambers' logo that one used to wrap around the corner of a skeleton argument before stapling, to make it look *mwah* and tip top!). As it turned out, in fact the image they had shared was of a digital corner on a digital document, which was rather a cute idea. Shoulda worn my varifocals... But just as I was mentally dummy slapping myself for that misunderstanding, there came a comment about pink tape (the thing not the blog). Which really has now fallen out of use entirely (covid being the death knell). When I started this blog in 2007 pink tape was still a recognisable thing which had meaning, at least to the lawyers who read this blog, if not necessarily all the non-lawyers. But...

Since judgments arising from the Family Court are not routinely published, what we see in them isn't necessarily representative of patterns within the Family Court as a whole. But they are one useful source of at least some information about how the QLR system is operating on the ground, and give us a sense of the sorts of issues and themes to look out for. In truth, it isn't easy to identify another source of information about how its going (though some well targeted FOI requests might assist). I searched TNA Caselaw archive for judgments in the Family Court, Family Division or Court of Appeal (Civil Division) containing the keyword 'QLR'. There were 35 matching judgments published in 2025 or 2026 (to date), spanning 34 cases (in one case there was a fact finding judgment and a welfare judgment - I treat those together). I have made a table of those judgments at the end of this post. 26 of the cases were about children and 8 were financial remedy or divorce cases. The judgments were...

It really was a loooong month, wasn't it? Death, storms, and the general dank gloom that comes with this time of year. We escaped actual flooding or storm damage here, but it's not far from us. Quite apart from the weather though, the flow of urgent tasks has been pretty relentless, there is always a remote meeting in the day's forecast, and my days have been filled with the usual grim reading material. And my inbox...well the floodwater there has been pretty biblical. I've done a month now as FLBA Vice Chair (one reason for the rising tide of emails). It's been an eye opener. There is so much work to do, at this toughest of times for the family bar. Lots of my friends and colleagues are desperate for the resumption of legal aid payments but extremely worried about recoupments of the contingency payments. The mood is as dank as the weather. There is talk of people leaving the bar altogether, people who have just had enough, who feel unheard and disrespected, Please keep an eye on...

in August 2007 right at the start of Pink Tape, I wrote a post called 'What's the difference between a barrister and a solicitor?' Although that post is almost 20 years old it remains one of the all time most visited pages on this blog. Surprisingly, it remains more or less accurate (though it has a surprising number of typos and missed capitals), and it appears that it remains as needed as ever - a recent post on LinkedIn described continuing misinformation that perpetuate the idea of barristers being better or higher than solicitors. That prompted me to take another look at my old post. I thought that I'd just give the 2007 post a bit of spit and polish, to make sure it is applicable to 2026. So here goes... (if you want to read the original post you can read that here). You will notice that I didn't mention legal executives in my original post, I think because I was trying to keep things simple. But it seems important to add them in to this updated version, because they are one of...