16 FEATURE I


t was after she had survived an attack by three masked men armed with metal bars that her firm ‘really started to fly’, family law solicitor Marilyn Stowe tells the Gazette. The December


2003 robbery, which happened outside the converted cobbler’s shop in Halton, east Leeds, where she had started her legal practice some 20 years earlier, prompted her to move away from the scene of the crime and to new premises in Harrogate. That was April 2004, since when,


as Stowe Family Law, she has opened further offices: in central London; Hale and Wilmslow, Cheshire; and in Wetherby and (again) Leeds, West Yorkshire. ‘There may be big firms with bigger family law departments than us,’ she says, ‘but we believe that we are the country’s largest specialist family law firm, with a 44-strong team, including 30 solicitors.’ Stowe has crammed a lot into the


years since she was admitted to the roll in 1980. She married and had a son, who is currently a trainee with a City firm after gaining a first-class law degree at Leeds University. She has appeared on TV and radio, written several books and, acting pro bono, unearthed the medical evidence that freed solicitor Sally Clark, wrongly imprisoned for killing her two infant sons. She has been a member of two legal advisory groups to the Law Commission, is a qualified arbitrator and has been described as a ‘formidable’ divorce lawyer by The Times. Her family on both sides are descended from penniless Russian immigrants who arrived here after fleeing the anti-Jewish pogroms of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like so many immigrants, they were unafraid to work hard. ‘My grandfather had a sweet stall in the market,’ recalls Stowe, ‘and, in the late 1940s, my grandmother was one of the first women journalists on the Yorkshire Evening News [absorbed into the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1963]. My father became a runner for the same newspaper when he was 14 years old.’ Stowe’s mother wanted her daughter to have a career rather than, as was traditional for a Jewish woman of her generation, to marry young and start a family. And so Stowe went to the prestigious Leeds Girls High School followed by Leeds University, where she read law. At that stage, international law was her particular interest and earned her a lectureship at Le Mans University. ‘After I’d been a year in France,’ she says, ‘my father phoned me to say it was time to come home and do some real work.’ She dutifully returned home


www.lawgazette.co.uk


23 June 2014


Marilyn Stowe


The gloves are off


Dealing with warring couples has not given ‘formidable’ divorce lawyer Marilyn Stowe a jaundiced view of human nature. Quite the reverse, she tells Jonathan Rayner


for articles with Leeds firm Zermansky & Partners and was admitted to the roll in 1980. By 1982, she had joined Leeds firm Grahame Stowe Bateson (she was later to marry Grahame Stowe), where her commercial clients included her father and his rapidly growing business. It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, around the time that her father’s company was becom- ing too big for a non-specialist commercial lawyer to handle, that a perceptible increase in the divorce rate turned Stowe’s attention to family law. ‘Up until the 1970s, women


on the whole didn’t work,’ she explains. ‘It was still very hard for women to get divorced because they didn’t have a job – even their maintenance income was taxed – and they had fami- lies to support.’ But then it all changed, she continues, with ‘contraception


coming into vogue’ and women increasingly expecting to go out to work and have careers. And with this new independence came a new willingness – and the financial means – to escape an unhappy mar- riage through divorce. Has dealing


day in, day out with warring couples given her a jaundiced view of life? ‘Quite the opposite,’ Stowe replies. ‘It has given me a great belief in human nature. We are basically all the same, with the same fears, loves, anxieties, ambitions, priorities.’ She adds: ‘Divorce often


out the worst qualities, whether it’s through guilt, anxiety, anger, refusal to see what is staring us in the face... It’s an emotional rollercoaster


Divorce oſten brings


through guilt, anxiety, anger, refusal to see what is staring us in the face, bitterness, envy, fear or anything else bad. It is an emotional rollercoaster. When people are really hurting, particularly if they have been “swapped” for somebody else, self-preservation becomes all-important. For some, such a state of mind leads to an all-con- suming hatred, malice and burning desire for vengeance. I don’t put my clients in that situation. It is my job to get them out of it and show them that there is a future.’ Returning to the


brings out our very worst qualities, agreed, whether it’s


‘desire for vengeance’, has Stowe had clients who have gone to extreme lengths to get even with a cheating spouse? ‘After all my years as a divorce


INTERVIEW


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