The setting aside of a £3.5m divorce case is a “salutary example” of the consequences of not having legal representation.
The Court of Appeal delivered “excoriating criticism” of the way the seven-year case had been handled, in Iqbal v Iqbal [2017] EWCA Civ 19, say Shlomit Glaser, principal solicitor, Glaser Jones Law, and Tim Jones, Professor of Law at Swansea University. Writing in this week’s NLJ, they explain that media coverage missed the “elephant in the room”, namely that this was a case involving litigants in person.
“Principally, it seems that what went wrong was not caused by any defect or complexity in the law...It is highly probable that many, if not all, [of the] faults would have been avoided had one or both parties secured legal representation from the outset,” Glaser and Jones say.