If you have ever received bad service or suffered damage to your family court case due to your family lawyers, please sign this petition.

We are hearing more and more accounts from family law clients of family lawyers (both legally aided and privately paid) that they are not being robustly represented. They say they have lost their children as a direct result of this. If you have experienced this, please sign this petition.

This includes claims of family lawyers not following reasonable instructions, acting against the instructions of clients, pandering to local authorities instead of challenging them, not providing breakdowns of costs or estimates, excessive time recorded for tasks, not obtaining disclosure to further clients cases, not chasing up courts to move matters along, unfairly threatening to terminate retainers, providing a poor service generally and retraumising victims of domestic abuse.

Further, orders are drafted with ambiguity and leave holes which often lead to parties having to go back to the court with further legal costs being incurred. There seems to be no motivation to fix the family court system as multiple hearings mean more legal costs. Even lawyers who campaign for legal aid to be extended could profit from their campaigning if their firms hold legal aid contracts, so the campaigning does not appear completely selfless. Some of the same lawyers do not appear to be robustly representing their clients.

Regulators need to investigate why this appears to be happening across the board in the family law industry, and evaluate whether firms being on council lists for public law outline work and membership of Resolution is affecting their ability to robustly represent their clients. Conflicts of interest and other professional obligations need to be considered. Legal aid contracts may need to be re-distributed. Legal aid and privately paid for time recording needs to be scrutinised.

Lawyers representing clients in court have been criticised by those clients, for caring more about how they come across to a judge because they have future hearings in front of them, rather than robustly representing their current client. 

Lawyers who represent a lot of local authorities need to consider if they can robustly represent parent clients without any conflict, as challenging local authorities could result in some local authorities not instructing them in the future.

Whilst in cases involving no abuse the principles of collaboration and resolution might work, it is submitted that the softly softly approach is not suitable for cases involving domestic abuse. Training is needed for all practitioners regarding domestic abuse and coercive control. At present, it seems more effective to instruct a Mckenzie Friend and be a litigant in person than deal with family lawyers.

Please sign this petition so that the family law industry can be scrutinised for their failures. The petition and these issues can then be raised with regulators and the legal aid board. Complaints about individual cases are not enough, the pattern of failures needs to be made clear. Thank you.