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Family law: taking a different turn

12 April 2024 / Caroline Bowden
Issue: 8066 / Categories: Features , Family , Mediation
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With FPR changes focusing on non-court solutions, Caroline Bowden suggests solicitors send clients to a MIAM, aim to settle and try to keep appropriate clients out of court
  • Sets out key changes and offers practical advice to family lawyers on the FPR changes, due to take effect from 29 April 2024.
  • There may be no new legislation to make mediation compulsory, but the changes are likely to have an impact on the way solicitors work.
  • Lawyers should aim to resolve client issues away from court, where possible.
  • Explains the exemptions to non-court dispute resolution.

Solicitors have a key role in steering their clients through to settlement. For too long, too many do so with a court-based mindset, even while conducting negotiations. However, in future all lawyers will have to pay more attention to the non-court space, as well as the pre-court space. If attempts at settlement via correspondence have broken down, or even if they never started, lawyers will need to think of every conceivable way of avoiding court,

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NEWS
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Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
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