Hi, my name is Verity and in April 2010 I will have spent the last 25 years practising Divorce and Family Law with Swinburne Snowball & Jackson, here in Consett (after all of this time you would think that I'd be able to get it right without practising wouldn't you?)
Within my first month at the firm a colleague of mine got married, and as the invite to his silver wedding celebration dropped onto the door mat, I got to thinking about my job over the last 25 years and the changes I'd seen. As you can imagine over the last quarter of a century certain aspects of the job have changed pretty dramatically.
When I first started, there was no Children Act, no CSA (although I have my doubts about whether or not the CSA ever really existed as its overall effectiveness led one to believe that it was a figment of the last Conservative Government's imagination,) there was no Family Law Act, no Ancillary Relief protocol no collaborative law and very little mediation.
What the law said or how the law worked and your rights were also a mystery to most people, the nearest the average person came to being able to access this information independently was probably a "Which guide to your rights" or "The Penguin guide to the law." mobile phones didn't exist, a fax machine was a rarity, word processors were few and far between and the Internet was unheard of (unless you were a NASA techno geek.)
The information age ushered in by the Internet has heralded some radical changes in respect of the free access to information. Just try googling "how do I divorce?" and you are rewarded with almost 60 million hits providing you with a wealth of information to answer your query.
Yet for all of the changes in technology, procedures and communications, not to mention the now freely available access to the law which requires nothing more than a few key strokes and clicks. The job of being a divorce solicitor remains fundamentally the same.
Not least because all of this information needs some interpretation and sifting as to how it all applies to your circumstances. This is the tricky part because the English courts and parliament have tried to make the law as flexible as possible to allow Judges to craft what "fair" solutions for each slightly different set of circumstances; and also because at the end of the day family lawyers are dealing with universal and timeless human emotion and conflict which often come in to play with the break up of a relationship.
So although we may be able to communicate more quickly and efficiently our role remains the same, our job is to advise and guide the client as they navigate a course through the emotional and financial turmoil and the legally uncertain outcome to arrive at a position where they can move on with the next stage of their lives.
Coming to see a lawyer is not something you look forward to and at Swinburne Snowball & Jackson the Family team aims to make this process as quick and painless as possible with a maximum of dignity and a minimum of conflict.
