Because your family matters

A family dispute, such as divorce or relationship breakdown, is inevitably a difficult time for the individuals concerned. It can also impact business interests; either directly for owner managers when company interests become the subject of a dispute or indirectly, when dealing with personal issues becomes a distraction that affects your work.

Our team of leading family lawyers specialises in helping entrepreneurs and other busy professionals, both in the UK and internationally, to navigate the financial and emotional fallout of relationship breakdown.

As like-minded professionals, we understand your business and personal pressures. We are known for offering superlative standards of client care. This isn’t just about the empathic approach you’d expect; we take time to understand each individual client’s priorities for themselves, their family and their business. Our expertise as family lawyers, combined with commercial acumen, common-sense and an open-minded approach towards helping resolve your particular issue, has earned us a following amongst business innovators, their spouses and professional advisers who recognise the value our involvement brings.

We’ll offer you a genuine choice of routes to settle your personal situation. Negotiation is often the most effective and compassionate course, and we’re highly experienced in these methods, including alternative dispute resolution and mediation. From a damage limitation point of view, court proceedings may not be the right answer, particularly if you have a reputation to protect and want to minimise publicity. Litigation is usually a last resort. Sometimes, it will be the most effective route, or prove necessary to protect your interests or provide a clear timetable for resolving matters. If you have to go to court, we’ll be decisive, determined and fight your corner hard.

As well as looking after our clients, we collaborate with other professional advisers specialising in business and wealth preservation. For example, we can advise on drafting corporate governance, trust and real estate transaction documents to protect key individuals from the impact of relationship breakdown – either their own or within their wider family.

Here are some of the things we can help with:

Wealth preservation

• Pre- and post-marital and civil partnership agreements
• Corporate governance and partnership agreements; pre-empting post-divorce disputes over the ownership of business assets
• Advising professional trustees on limiting the exposure of trust assets following relationship breakdown
• Strategic advice to finance professionals acting for husbands and wives or wealthy families.
• Advice on property ownership

Relationship breakdown

• Dealing with high value and complex disputes on divorce or separation for business innovators, landed estate owners, busy professionals or their spouses
• Resolving disputes about children within the UK and cross-border
• Disputes between cohabitees and civil partners
• Same sex relationship disputes

Surrogacy

• Modern families come in many shapes and sizes. Surrogacy is a highly-specialised area of the law requiring expertise both in the UK and internationally.