Resolution embraces ‘one lawyer, one couple’ approach to divorce

Harvey: Supplying alternative beneath the Resolution banner

Family members attorneys team Resolution is to start out advertising and marketing the ‘one lawyer, two clients’ product for divorce that both equally regulation firms and unregulated providers are commencing to offer.

It has sought tips from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) and counsel to ensure that its Resolution Alongside one another initiative complies with regulatory necessities around confidentiality, privilege, data sharing and conflict.

Acting for both of those functions has previously started, these as providers supplied by London agency Withers, national observe Simpson Millar and regional agency Fullers Family Law, as perfectly as the barrister-led Divorce Surgical procedures and unregulated business amicable.

In 2020, a senior Substantial Court decide granted declarations creating it very clear that amicable did not break conflict of desire regulations by performing for both spouse and wife.

Last November, Resolution foresaw a future the place lawyers acted for both equally sides of divorces as a make a difference of program.

Implementation of the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act, which will allow partners to make joint applications to close a relationship collectively, has encouraged the transfer as a way to provide an amicable resolution of any disputes among the pair.

The rules and benchmarks for Resolution Alongside one another refer to the appropriate elements of the SRA, Bar Benchmarks Board and CILEx Regulation codes and lay out how a one lawyer could do the job with, and suggest, a few collectively in suited and suitable conditions and sets out how regulatory difficulties are to be managed.

The benchmarks encompass an outline for follow and a phase-by-action flowchart as to how a practitioner, detailing necessities for preliminary conferences, contracting, guidance supplying, and so on, by means of to ultimate proposals and getting ready any draft arrangement.

They set out the importance of initial and ongoing evaluation and screening at the begin of – and all over the case – for any aspects which would make it inappropriate or unsafe to carry on or keep on with advising the few jointly, together with a model retainer and settlement.

Resolution is to offer you teaching and steerage to customers afterwards this year.

Resolution chair Juliet Harvey pressured that Resolution Jointly was just another selection lawyers could supply: “Increasingly, clientele are anticipating, or in some cases demanding, new techniques that we have not been capable to offer you in the previous.

“With the introduction of no-fault divorce and, for the first time, the opportunity to make a joint software that came with it, need for this type of tactic is only likely to enhance.

“Indeed, numerous companies are previously giving, or on the lookout to provide, this technique: that is why we want to offer a way of doing work beneath the Resolution banner, in trying to keep with our code of observe.”

The John Cornwell Foundation provided a “generous donation” to fund counsel’s opinion on the regulatory issues John Cornwell was Resolution’s founder 40 many years ago.

To understand additional about the initiative, Resolution is keeping a webinar on 12 July.