In January 2026, I celebrated 30 years as a family lawyer, 11 of them as a partner in a large provincial law firm and then 14 of them as a niche sole practitioner. In that time, practising family law has changed beyond all recognition, and mostly (but not entirely) for the better.
For this blog, I thought I might review how various areas have changed.
Law firms
When I first began practising in family law, there were (as far as I can recall) 15 or so 16 solicitors’ firms in Colchester that undertook family law work. Some of these firms were very large, such as the one where I was then a trainee solicitor, then later a solicitor and then a partner. Others were much smaller, with a couple of them being sole practitioners.
There are now only at most 11 law firms in Colchester who undertake family law, four of whom are relatively recent arrivals in the city. A couple of them seem to be very tiny, not always manned branches of big firms. Some of the Colchester firms that existed in 1996 have been taken over by larger Colchester firms. One large local firm was taken over by a huge national chain recently. Some have closed down. Armstrong Family Law opened in 2011 and is still going strong.
A senior solicitor who I have known throughout my career decided to retire recently, and I realised with a shock that along with one other family law solicitor in Colchester, we were now the most senior family law solicitors in the city (in terms of years served).
The court
In 1996, Colchester had a County Court, presided over by a circuit judge and two district judges. The court office was filled with support staff and managed efficiently by a Chief Clerk.
There was also a separate Family Proceedings Court (FPC) hidden away in an unprepossessing building above the local Register Office, where lay magistrates handled public law cases, usually involving applications by the local authority to take children at risk into care, and private law children disputes involving unmarried parents.
The dual court system didn’t really make much sense. As a general rule, if you were or had been married, the County Court would deal with disputes about your children, as well as divorces and ancillary relief (i.e. financial) applications. If the parents had never been married to each other, their cases were supposed to be handled by the Family Proceedings Court.
Solicitors tended to prefer the County Court where the decisions would be made by experienced circuit and district judges, rather than the FPC where the decisions would be made by three lay magistrates, guided on the law by a Justices Clerk. The Legal Aid Board (soon to be called the Legal Services Commission, and now known as the Legal Aid Agency) tried to stop that by attaching conditions to legal aid certificates requiring the applications to commence in the FPC where we were paid even less than we were in the County Court.
In theory, the FPC could grant domestic violence injunctions, but no-one ever bothered applying there. The County Court was much better.
It’s now very different. The County Court in Colchester slowly withered away. The resident circuit judge retired and was not replaced. Instead we had different judges who came and went, but were never based here. After a while, the circuit judges stopped coming completely and if the case had to be heard before a circuit judge, the hearings would take place in Chelmsford or Ipswich. Then the district judges slowly went too. It became more and more common to find that hearings were listed before deputy district judges (i.e. part time). One district judge retired and eventually the other one was moved to Chelmsford. The number of support staff had been falling for years, presided over not by a Chief Clerk but someone with the utterly anodyne modern title of Court Manager.
In common with many court buildings, Colchester just became a venue for hearings, and the admin was dealt with elsewhere. The court finally closed in 2017. The days were long gone when I could pick up the phone and speak to a member of the court staff to check something. Instead we had to call a court helpline which dealt with cases for a large number of courts in East Anglia. This has not been a success. Even now, you will usually end up in a queue waiting for your call to be answered. Waits of over an hour are commonplace. If you got through and spoke to someone, they often could not help much as the paper based system meant that they could not tell from the information on their computer screen if something had happened yet or not.
I recall once calling Weston-Super-Mare County Court about a case. Expecting a long time on hold, I put the call on speaker phone and decided to do some filing while listening to the dreadful music, periodically interrupted by an automated voice telling me how important my call was to them.
Half way across the office, to my astonishment, someone answered and I had to dash back to my desk. The West Country still had a proper phone system.
Since 2014, there has been a single Family Court, which combined the County Court’s family jurisdiction and the FPC. They did not build any new court buildings to do this. The hearings take place in front of the same judges and magistrates as before. The judges will also sit in the County Court, dealing with civil cases. Court orders now state that the orders are made “In the Family Court sitting at Chelmsford Justice Centre” or wherever, although a depressingly large number of solicitors and barristers still draft orders that say “In the Chelmsford Family Court”; there is no such court. There is only one Family Court, and on that occasion it was sitting in Chelmsford.
The unification of the two courts and the creation of the Family Court made absolute sense, but has unfortunately took place at a time when the court budget was squeezed and cases therefore began to take a horrific length of time to run their course. The court has become increasingly paperless, which is a definite improvement and there has been a gradual introduction of online portals to enable documents to be filed electronically, rather than by emails to the court which often seem to vanish without trace.
Judges have, in my experience, changed. Nowadays they seem far less prone to interruption and will actually let you have your say, even if they then disagree with your submission. They also seem much younger, but that is just probably because I am now in my late fifties.
We have also started to address District Judges differently. We used to address them as “Sir” or “Madam”. A few years ago, we were told that henceforth they should be addressed in court as “Judge”, which prior to then, we had only used when talking to them outside court. Apparently many female district judges prefer this, as “Madam” had a whiff of the bordello about it. After almost three decades of calling district judges “Sir” or “Madam”, I struggle to remember to address them as “judge”, much as crusty old practitioners in my youth insisted on addressing magistrates as “Your Worship”.
The office
When I started as a trainee solicitor in 1994, I was given a desk on which the only piece of tech was an ancient rotary dial telephone. Admittedly, that was pretty old-fashioned even for 1994. IT was pretty basic. There was a firmwide computerised accounts system, to which we all had access via terminals on a read only basis (only the accounts department was allowed to input information). Time recording was done by completing paper time sheets. The work in progress figure in the accounts system was hugely unreliable and when we calculated the work done on a case for a bill, we counted every letter and attendance note manually.
There were two modern computers in the whole firm. In the civil litigation department, a secretary manned a Windows PC, on which she would type letters in cases where the firm had undertaken agency work, i.e. work undertaken for other solicitors. In the commercial property department, another secretary operated an Apple Mac, on which she would type up commercial leases. She jealously guarded it. No-one else was allowed to touch it, even when she was on holiday.
In 1995, the firm decided to embrace the modern world and installed PCs throughout the firm. Email and the internet did not properly arrive until 1999. A few months before we were all given access to email, I was invited by a friend to her wedding. My friend was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs in London and her PA was in charge of organising the nuptials. My invitation arrived in the post, but we were requested to RSVP by email. I had to go and see one of our secretaries who I understood to be in charge of the “email machine” and she sent the RSVP for me.
When email arrived, I embraced it enthusiastically. I recall one local solicitor telling me that I was the only person who ever emailed her. There were weeks when I received as many as three or even four emails. One day in 2000, I noticed that I had not received any emails for a few days. An hour without an email appears odd now, but in 2000 it wasn’t strange. In those days the email server was kept on a desk in one of the firm’s interview rooms. One of the other solicitors had been in a consultation with a client and became irritated by the server clicking, whirring and dialling up. (For those of you who have only ever known modern broadband, PC modems used to have to dial up the internet service provider periodically to download emails or to prove internet access, and would make a noise that I can only describe as being like a consumptive parrot clearing its throat.) So irritated was my colleague, that he simply unplugged the server. It took us three days to notice.
Solicitors were sometimes resistant to these changes. I recall two older colleagues who manned a branch office agreeing with each other that they would never use email at the branch. (They were not successful in that ambition). I was frequently irritated by lawyers at other firms who I would email, and who would then reply through the post many days later. Many solicitors carried on doing that until about 2012.
At around the same time, we had to cope with the threat from the Millenium bug (aka Y2K), where it was predicted that computers would suddenly stop working on 1 January 2000 as their systems would be unable to cope with the fact that it was no longer the twentieth century, and the day and dates would no longer match the year. Our IT guy dealt with this by simply telling the accounts system that 1 January 2000 was 1 January 1900. This seemed to work fine. Years on the system were in two digit format (i.e. 00 not 1900 or 2000).
That is, until 29 February 2000. 1900 wasn’t a leap year, but 2000 was. The accounts system simply could not cope with discovering that there was an extra day and the system refused to work. Thankfully, on 1 March 2000, we got it going again.
An insistence by the Legal Services Commission that we had to update our accounts system meant that I was able to persuade my partners that we should update our accounts system. There as a great deal of grumbling about this as it would inevitably be very expensive. I recall it costing the firm about £100,000 or so. As many of the partners were keen for us to give up poorly paid and increasingly unprofitable legal aid work, forking out £100,000 for the privilege of doing legal aid was not a popular idea.
Luckily our finance director, a man of great common sense and influence in the firm, was able to explain to them that we would for the first time entitled to keep any additional interest that accrued on pooled client funds held in a single account. That, and the fact that we were now able to accurately time record work, meant that the new system paid for itself very quickly.
Other technological changes followed, such as digital dictation, form software, mobile phones and then Blackberrys. Faxes, commonplace in the 1990’s have died out, as did telex before them.
I left that firm in 2011 and set up my own firm. I decided that I wanted to operate a much leaner business model. I did not employ a secretary and instead prepared all documents myself, using dictation software. I stored all of my case files in a cloud-based document management and accounts system. I outsourced the bookkeeping.
Eventually, in 2019, I decided to go paperlite and stopped printing off every single email and letter that I received and then placing them in the physical file. This decision meant that when, a year later, the country when into its first COVID lockdown and we all had to work from home, I was able to weather the storm without too much difficulty. I dusted off my emergency plan and noted wryly that although it had plans for dealing with fire, flood and war, I had not taken into account the possibility of a plague. Nevertheless, the solution was the same; I had to move everything home
I had already invested in a webcam and started seeing clients by video. The court notified us that (although solicitors engaged in litigation were keyworkers and allowed to leave our homes), no physical hearings would take place and all hearings would be by video or phone.
I recall a video meeting with all of the other collaborative practitioners in Colchester, where they all moaned that it was difficult to work without their secretaries on hand to help. “Welcome to my world” I said, trying not to sound too smug. By that point I had been working without a secretary for nine years and I knew that I didn’t need one.
(To be continued)
You can read Part 2 here.
You can read Part 3 here.
21 March 2026
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