Family Law

I was watching a recent episode of Heartbeat and was a little disgruntled at the way in which a female family solicitor was represented. 

The storyline involved a married couple both with fiery characters, who were engaging in rather petty arguments.  The wife poured her husband’s bottles of brandy down the drain and took his Jaguar car for a spin, colliding with a bin en-route and the husband broke the wife’s china doll collection.  The wife retaliated by sawing the heads off the husband’s golf clubs! 

This appeared to be a rather childish “tit for tat” situation but the wife decided to instruct a solicitor to issue divorce proceedings and the solicitor was very forceful in persuading her to apply to the court for an injunction to restrict the husband’s behaviour, whilst putting words in the wife’s mouth to imply that she was “frightened” of her husband. 

Whilst we family lawyers appreciate the necessity for certain actions (such as injunctive relief) in the correct circumstances, we should certainly not try to “influence” our clients along such paths if not appropriate.  Let us hope times have now changed as I do not think that this family law solicitor was a pioneering member of Resolution and was certainly not following our Code of Good Practice.  Perhaps we could refer the programme makers to the Resolution website www.resolution.org.uk for further guidance!