4 Monday April 4 2022 | the timestimes2
F
or anyone staring idly at
their spouse across the
breakfast table and
wondering how 2022
will be a landmark year
for splitting up — “no
fault” divorce is finally
coming to England and
Wales — I have encouraging news. It’s
from speaking to a pair of divorce
lawyers with five children, 29 years of
marriage (not to each other),
thousands of former couples and one
radical new idea between them.
First, to get a flavour of what is at
stake and how it could change, these
two pioneering lawyers, Samantha
Woodham and Harry Gates, bring up
the case known only by the first initial
of the husband and wife’s
last name: “M v M”,
although it could equally
have been Kramer vs
Kramer or The War of the
Roses. This divorcing pair’s
final battle took up
precious time in the High
Court in 2020 after two
years of poisonous,
escalating litigation that
turned the couple’s three
children against their
father, destroyed theFrom Wednesday the ‘no fault’
divorce finally becomes law.
Helen Rumbelow meets two
lawyers who know how to make
friendly separations the norm
Above, from left:
Katie Holmes and
Tom Cruise; Amber
Heard and Johnny
Depp; Sheikh
Mohammed bin Rashid
al-Maktoum and
Princess Haya Bint
al-Hussein; Ben Affleck
and Jennifer Garner.
Below: Harry Gates
and Samantha
Woodhamfamily’s previously middle-class
London life and cost a combined
£594,000 in legal fees.
When the case ended the judge
divided their assets roughly equally,
but after costs that left them only
£5,000 each. The judge concluded that
this horrible morality tale was
“ruinous and recriminatory...
unforgiving”, and said: “It is hard to
express what a calamitous waste of
resources this has been.” It sounds as if
the judge went home and kissed his
wife with relief, but did the lawyers
pocketing half a million pounds also
stare in the mirror and wonder what
they were doing with their lives?
Some of them, yes. This Wednesday
comes the momentous shift in the law
for anyone ending a marriage. For the
first time in our country’s legal history
— changing a law that dates back to
Henry VIII — you can get a “no-fault
divorce”, the start of a new era or a
contradiction in terms depending on
how you feel about your ex.
It’s not the only change, since judges
have signalled that they don’t want to
see standard divorces in court. Family
courts were already in crisis. Since the
pandemic they have been
overwhelmed by overdue
and serious child
protection cases. They no
longer have the time or
patience to spend on
couples demanding a
ruling on their squabbles
over which junction of
the M4 or which exact
spot of Clapham Junction
railway station they
should perform the
weekly kid handover.
Yes, these are from realand recent court cases. The judge of
the Clapham Junction case said that
the parents set an “appalling” example
to their son and I agree that the case
was unnecessary given that there is a
perfectly good Costa on platform one.
Put both changes together and
unhappy couples are being allowed
and asked to grow up at the same time
as divorce lawyers are being asked to
find another way. Britain is practically
founded on a history of nasty divorces
— now we are being asked to play
nice, which puts us somewhere
between Gwyneth Paltrow’s
Californian “conscious uncoupling”
and the chilled-out Swedish model of
Björn Ulvaeus from Abba and his two
amicable splits. How?
For Woodham and Gates this
historic moment is the start of a shift
in which divorce will finally be freed of
centuries of stigma and seen instead as
a positive “life goal”. They have written
a book, The Divorce Surgery, on how
to have a blame-free separation. They
base their advice for amicable,
uplifting divorce on experience; the
pair have pioneered a national first, a
“one couple, one lawyer” approach. It’s
fast, cheap, cheery and, to me, weird.
One lawyer, really, for both sides?
The idea was brought to Woodham
by a couple who hoped for an
amicable split and asked if she could
represent them both. Woodham is,
alongside Gates, a barrister at one of
London’s leading family law chambers.
Woodham knew that sharing divorce
lawyers was unheard of; the whole
point of barristers is to take a side and
that is how most people experience
divorce — with friends and family
taking a side too. She had spent her
career fighting embittered spousesthrough the courts, working up to
more expensive and complex cases.
“But one thing you can’t buy your
way out of is the adversarial process
and the acrimony and conflict that
causes,” she tells me over a joint video
call with Gates. “The problem is that
they are trapped in a process that
drives you away from decency.”
Woodham began to research the
international position.
“I found out that if you got divorced
in France, the Netherlands or Italy, it’s
the default to go to one lawyer
together. It’s only if there are real
complexities or abuse dynamics that
you go to separate lawyers. So I made
inquiries with the Bar Council and the
Bar Standards Board.”
She was told that, contrary to
popular belief, it was possible as long
as she did no take both parties to court
(which would, however, make a good
sitcom). Her proposal was that couples
would put both sides to her and, given
her long experience, she would explain
to them how a judge would probably
decide their case or, in other words,
“cut to the end”. This saves not only
money but time. It is also markedly
different from “mediation”, the existing
alternative to the courts, since
mediators are specifically prevented
from giving legal advice.
Meanwhile Gates was coming at
things from a different but equally
pragmatic angle. He had been trying
for years to launch a business selling
“divorce insurance” to newlyweds. It
didn’t work out.
In their book they quote Joan
Rivers: “Half of all marriages end in
divorce — and then there are the
really unhappy ones.” In 2019 there
were 108,000 divorces in England andCan we end the divorce blame
The fast one The acrimonious one