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Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division of the High Court, has called for a change in the language used by Family Solicitors including not using the word "opponent" at all.
Less adversarial language has always been the intention and basis of collaborative law. Sir Andrew McFarlane has gone further to say that adversarial terms to describe parents inflame tensions in cases involving children, where the aim is to look at the best outcome for the children. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme Sir Andrew McFarlane said that language should be tempered to avoid making differences between divorcing couples even more pronounced and he drew parallels with the classic film "Kramer -v- Kramer".
Norfolk was one of the pioneering areas launching collaborative law. As part of this collaborative lawyers locally committed to adhere to a much less adversarial approach which was very successful. Neale Grearson, Partner and Head of the Family Department at Clapham & Collinge and one of the first collaborative lawyers in Norfolk is disappointed that collaborative law has not continued with the initial momentum. He commented "the approach between collaborative lawyers is very different even in non-collaborative cases. However since all the changes surrounding Covid-19 and the pandemic in the last three years the amount of collaborative law cases has reduced substantially which is difficult to explain. Collaborative law and its approach is still available and the lack of "in-person" meetings should not have changed this. Now have we have emerged from the pandemic and there is a ''new world" it is to be hoped that collaborative law will resume its earlier momentum but most importantly that all lawyers adopt the approach advocated by Sir Andrew McFarlane in using better and less aggressive language - both verbal and written".
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*This article is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or other professional advice.
