Cohabitation Awareness Week
For more and more couples, living together without marrying is their fairy-tale ‘happy ending’, but the often mentioned concept of a ‘common law marriage’ is just that – fiction. There is no such thing as a common law partner, regardless of the length of their cohabitation. And unlike upon the breakdown of a marriage, the […]
Hate To Say It But Christmas Is Coming
Now that Halloween is over…and in fact even before it was….you will no doubt have seen that Christmas is creeping up – shops are full of toys, treats and tempting food and soon it will be everywhere you look. Christmas is often a difficult time for many for a variety of reasons. For families having […]
Dispute Resolution Week 24-28th November 2014
In aid and support of Resolution’s National Dispute Resolution week (24th to 28th November) Purcell solicitors are donating all of their normal charges from initial, new client appointments during that week to a local charity – Milton Keynes Children’s Contact Centre. Initial, new, appointments are offered by Purcell solicitors at a fixed price. This is […]
Legal Costs – The Options
Legal costs in family cases can range from hundreds of pounds in straightforward cases to many thousands of pounds in more complex or acrimonious cases. Ultimately those legal costs, whatever the amount, have to be paid out of the parties own income or assets. I often tell clients that a case with two identical facts […]
Can a Child Know What is in Their Best Interests? (2)
Early this year I wrote about the Judge who agreed with the 15 year old girl who did not want to have a DNA test requested by her father. In that case the Judge held the child understood and knew the issues and accepted her view that it would not be in her interests to […]
Whos Decision to Allow a Child to Die
There have been two recent cases when the Courts had to deal with the very difficult issue of whether a child should be allowed to die against their parents wishes. In the first case NHS Trust v Baby X [2012] EWHC 2188 (Fam) Mr Justice Hedley ruled that the hospital were permitted to turn off […]
The Death of Legal Aid
Legal aid in most private law family cases will no longer be available from March 2013. Therefore anyone, no matter their financial circumstances, will be entitled to legal aid to deal with their divorce, separation, financial matters or children issues unless there is some form of provable domestic violence. We family lawyers are already seeing […]
Shared Parenting – will it work?
The Government has recently published proposals giving four different options to amend the Children Act 1989 whereby the Court when considering making a decision in relation to a child: Option 1 : requires the Court to presume that a child’s welfare is likely to be furthered through safe involvement with both parents – unless the […]
Time to Change the Divorce Laws?
A recent article in the Daily Mail stated that a Wife whose case went to the Court of Appeal argued that her husband should never have been “allowed” to divorce her because the grounds were so “trivial”. The article tells of how she had broken down in tears in Court when she described the particulars […]
Can a Child Know What Is In Their Best Interests?
In L v P (Paternity Test: Child’s Objection) [2011 EWHC 3399 Fam the Court ruled that a 15 year old girl who objected to a DNA test was competent to make this decision and the application by her father for a Specific Issue Order to have a DNA test was refused. The father contested paternity […]