So the original title of this post was “Government invests in family lawyers (not a joke)”. However my cheap gags were shown up for the tawdry trash they are when I went to the Resolution Conference this weekend.
As well as the camaraderie and the learning and the partying (shapes were thrown and we didn’t care) there was a lot of remembering John Cornwell, one of the founding members of Resolution. I never met him, but thanks to his determination and genius (getting lawyers to agree on something? now that’s achievement) Resolution was born as the Solicitor’s Family Law Association . Thirty years ago it started out with like-mindedness and here we are today. The organisation goes from strength to strength in innovating new ways of dealing with these utterly uncommercial disputes. The dancing goes from low to lower.
At conference it was announced that the grown ups at the DWP have found £669,000 to put towards a new pilot project , run by Resolution. (Resolution is the organisation of family lawyers who try to encourage separating parents to put their children first and it promotes a conciliatory approach to family law generally, find them here: http://www.resolution.org.uk/ )
This news of funding will come as a surprise to many people in the light of the spectacular cuts to the public money put towards civil legal aid. It is fair to say that Whitehall currently does not have a lot of form for this sort of thing.
The pilot project is to set up a new kind of advisor called a ”Family Matters Guide”. The pilot Guides will be a) a qualified Solicitor and b) a Mediator. At the moment, there are 3 places chosen on to run the project and each place has its designated guinea pig law firm. In my area it is Turpin & Millerhttp://www.turpinmiller.co.uk/ in Oxford (Crewe and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne being the other 2 places) who are the pilot firm.
Because I have psychic powers, I know you are thinking, ”Crikey, Mrs R, we have Family Law Solicitors and Barristers and Mediators and Collaborative lawyers and Arbitrators and Mackenzie friends and just SO MUCH CHOICE now.” Yes we do. And here’s some more. Except this time , the government seem willing to invest in it, which the general public may find more useful and agreeable
The Guide will use their legal know-how and mediation skills to make a pair of separating parents resolve their need to co-parent without using the courts. As I understand it, it is envisaged the Guide will work on communication between the parents, then draw the parents together to form a workable parenting agreement, then help them plan further support.
From the DWP’s perspective http://www.dwp.gov.uk/newsroom/press-releases/2013/apr-2013/dwp050-13.shtml, the pilot is particularly aimed at the hard to reach sector who have been well and truly stiffed by the Legal Aid reforms ( or as their website doesn’t say ” Whoops we just took away access to the best chance you had of an impartial advisor who was likely to temper your own unreasonable expectations but challenge the behaviour of your ex But HEY! here’s plan B”) , namely the teenage parent on benefits who is less likely (because of the statistical link between teenage pregnancy and social deprivation ) to have any natural, measured, unbiased support.
On balance, I think this is the natural next step in the development in advisory services for a very modern phenomenon, namely the complete acceptance/ expectation that around 50% of children will experience family breakdown (I am not a fan of this trend). There is a realisation that the damage to children caused by grownups arguing can have a lasting, lifelong impact on their development.
It is correct to say that vast amounts of stuff dealt with by Judges in Children Act hearings are not matters of great legal import (frequency of Skype contact, will Johnny be fed before he is returned after contact, will Mum start a doorstep ding dong when Johnny comes back…) BUT they are important to the families dealing with them. So often, the communication skills have been so poisoned between the parties that perfectly reasonable parenting suggestions are rejected out of hand due to the war of email/text/verbal attrition going on. And somehow it ends up in front of a Judge. Surely there must be better way? Which was of course, how John Cornwall started all this.
So a very interesting project. Now , of course, pilots are pilots because they iron wrinkles out of projects before we invest a lot of time and money in them. This might be a list of wrinkles to iron…
- Separating family advice is big business ; there are many different suppliers of the advice. Advocacy, litigation and admin, generic help, refereed discussions, counselling . These all belong to the army of Barristers, Solicitors, Mackenzie Friends, Mediators etc and they will be wondering which bit if the pie is for them? I am particularly interested in the reaction of our non lawyer Mediator brethren.
- I can see that with the right Guide, there could be a significant hit rate of cases turned away from the courts. I can see pressure being brought to bear on the project to open it up to non lawyers, then to non-mediators and then to any body who gets themselves “accredited” in some fashion. As lawyers, we will need to show the extra value a family lawyer brings to the process.
- There will need to be a protocol when it breaks down. Surely the lawyer acting as a Guide is conflicted from acting for both parties in litigation? I would expect this to be a given.
- I wonder whether the Guide work is privileged? Like mediation is now…
- Will the Direct Access Bar want to join in? Why can’t they?
- I do not do legal aid. This is purely a business decision. I will not work for one supplier, who sometimes defaults on payments, who pays a third of the rates, who does not believe in inflation and requires a firm to organise around the supplier’s bureaucracy. Is this going to be part of the legal aid merry-go-round?
- BUT, if it is going to be a new way of working for the Government, and effectively starting afresh with organising publicly funded advice, then I am interested. You see, as a pilot, it has potential to trial delivery of publicly funded advice in a new model (unbundled for example)
- I assume it will pay buttons because there will be a large volume of work. That is okay by me, but it does need to be worth it. It doesn’t strike me as suitable work for the inexperienced, so it won’t be “cheap” in terms of PQE of advisor.
- How will the impact be measured? You could measure a by Guide by what percentage of matters go to court after, say, 12 months.
- After the project, are we competing against the other very worthy projects also being funded? Perhaps that is a high-class problem to be worrying about at this stage, but I am intrigued to know whether this stands alone funding wise or whether it has to be “better” than the others.
I wish this project every success. I can absolutely see the merits and think it is a next step in the Resolution lawyers desire to “help other people”. John’s legacy lives on through Resolution. From the way people spoke about him this weekend I cannot imagine he was a soppy bloke, but he must have invested in some dreamtime to see the vision of Resolution. So to nick a good line from Yeats, let us tread softly, as we tread on his dreams…
