Mrs Armstrong and I went to see What We Did On Our Holiday last week. It’s a pleasant, fairly amusing bitter sweet comedy about a divorcing couple who travel from their home in London to Scotland for the husband’s father’s 75th birthday, and who have told the children not to tell their ailing grandfather that they are splitting. We enjoyed the film very much; so why did I leave the cinema fuming?
Sadly, the screenwriters decide that they would rely on the old stereotype of solicitors as doing nothing more than making matters worse. In one scene, the husband played by David Tennant, discovers that the wife (Rosamund Pike) is going to apply to the court for “leave to remove” so that she can take the children to live in Newcastle. Cue an old fashioned portrayal of solicitors as doing nothing but cause conflict where plenty already exists. In the end, everyone kisses and makes up and decide that while the divorce is still going ahead, they’re all going to get along just fine and the solicitors get sacked. At this point, I muttered a rude word and Mrs Armstrong told me to “Shh.”
Quite aside from the fact that Rosamund does not need leave to remove [from the jurisdiction] to take the children to live in Newcastle (Tyneside being in the same jurisdiction as London), there was no suggestion that the solicitors were trying to resolve a dispute, merely that using a solicitor makes disputes worse. This is a very old fashioned view of solicitors indeed.
Most family solicitors are members of Resolution, and abide by its Code of Practice that commits them to resolving disputes in a constructive and non-confrontational manner. Many of them will have trained as collaborative lawyers and are able to negotiate in a non-adversarial way designed to ensure that both parties work together to find the right solution and arrangements for the future I(including whether the children go to live in Newcastle). Others have trained as mediators, or will refer their clients to mediation, which provides another way of resolving things in such a way that the couple are at least still on speaking terms after the divorce. Even where these methods aren’t used, the culture amongst family solicitors is geared towards reaching an agreement, not victory at all costs.
There are solicitors who are unnecessarily aggressive or obstructive and who automatically think that court proceedings are the best way to resolve matters. However, they are a dying breed.
The trouble with this hackneyed portrayal of solicitors is that it deters people from seeking legal advice when they need it most. It perpetuates a myth that if it wasn’t for the lawyers, a divorce would be much simpler (a view often eagerly repeated by a husband or wife who thinks that their best interest are served by deterring their spouse from doing anything that might get them a fair share). Getting divorced is a complicated and technical process and it is very unwise to try to go it alone, especially if there are financial issues that need resolving. Even when everything has been agreed, you still need a solicitor to sort out the paperwork which is far too complex for most litigants in person to handle on their own.
Collaborative law or mediation aren’t very funny. In truth, they are quite dull. Conflict is so much more interesting. and therefore solicitors are condemned to being portrayed by TV and film as being part of the problem, not part of the solution.
10 October 2014