23 June 2014


www.lawgazette.co.uk PHOTO: DAVID TETT


part of her work and career, she says. That has been witnessing a growing number of people no longer able to afford representation by a solicitor. ‘It used to be that everyone had a solicitor,’ she says. ‘If you were poor, you got legal aid. If you were on a middling income, you got some legal aid and contributed the rest yourself. And if you were rich, as is still the case today, you paid for it all yourself.’ Now, she says, ‘we are seeing a


rise in litigants in person (LiPs), which is very troubling. Family law is not a formulaic kind of law. You need someone – a lawyer – who understands the law and can apply the relevant factors to individual cases’. Stowe is similarly concerned about couples who turn to the internet for a ‘cheap’ divorce. She says: ‘The law around divorce is nuanced and sophisticated. It is rarely, for example, a simple 50-50 split of assets. Only this week, a new client came to me who had messed up his online divorce.’ The main problems for


INTERVIEW17


lawyer, nothing surprises me any- more,’ she replies. She recalls a case where the wife


sold her pianist husband’s Steinway without his knowledge and another case where the wife sawed the legs off a Chippendale cabinet, then delivered it – along with the ampu- tated legs – to her errant husband. She adds: ‘There was also a wife who ran a bath of scalding water and bleach, into which she dumped all her husband’s suits and ties.’ She goes on to list her ‘top 10


dirty divorce tricks’, which include: using a friend to spy on your spouse; spending money wildly; sending a late night email to the spouse’s colleagues, friends and family with details of their infidelity; hiding money and valuable assets, which mysteriously reappear once the divorce is finalised; and moving, with your unsuspecting spouse, to a foreign country where the divorce regime is more favourable. Yet, this is not the demoralising


BIOG


BORN Leeds, West Yorkshire EDUCATION Leeds Girls High School; Leeds University, law; Chester College of Law CAREER Lecturer, University of Le Mans, France; articles, Zermansky & Partners, Leeds, admitted 1980; Grahame Stowe Bateson, 1982-2006 KNOWN FOR Founder of Stowe Family Law (2006)


both LiPs and do-it-your- self online divorcing cou- ples is ‘burying your head in the sand for too long’ or doing quite the opposite, says Stowe. In the first case, you never progress and just leave things to deteriorate still further, while in the second case you act in ‘too much of a rush’. Stowe says: ‘It might have seemed like a good idea to put the house on the market straightaway, but what hap- pens if it is sold before you decide who is to have what? You could both find yourself with nowhere to live and having to pay rent.’ In 2007, Stowe was a member of


the legal advisory group to the Law Commission when it reviewed the rights of cohabiting couples. The Gazette asks whether the confusion around cohabitation endures. ‘Very much so,’ she replies. ‘Cohabiting is virtually the norm before marriage these days and it is easy to drift into having children. Couples don’t heed the law because, at that point, it doesn’t impact upon them. It’s a dif- ferent story when things go wrong.’ Stowe advises cohabiting couples


to take advice – ‘gen up on the inter- net’ or read her book Divorce and Splitting Up. ‘You certainly mustn’t contemplate buying a property together without knowing your respective rights and obligations,’ she cautions. What did the Law Commission


decide? ‘Any proposed new legis- lation was put on the backburner,’ Stowe says. ‘It was a hot potato polit-


in litigants in person, which is very troubling... You need someone – a lawyer – who understands the law and can apply the relevant factors to individual cases


We are seeing a rise


ically because, the critics argued, it devalued marriage. My view was the opposite. It would have created a level playing field for cohabitees who otherwise, because they have no so-called “common law rights”, find themselves out of home and pocket.’ Stowe was one of the first family solicitors to qualify, on 22 Febru- ary 2012, as an arbitrator under a scheme launched by the Institute of Family Law Arbitrators. The institute and the scheme arose from collaboration between non-confron- tational divorce group Resolution, the Family Law Bar Association, the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and the Centre for Child and Family Law Reform. The Gazette asks her to spell out the advantages of family law arbitration. ‘Arbitration has long


been used to resolve commercial disputes and now we are applying it to family law, too,’ she responds. ‘It is fast, con- fidential and, in many cases, much less expen- sive than court proceed- ings.’ She continues that it is also flexible, with the arbitrator having consid- erable discretion about the procedure through which a fair result can be


achieved by applying English law. Looking to the future, what


changes would she like to see to family law? She replies that the law, quite rightly, is ‘very child- focused’, but should also become more focused on the parents. ‘It is so child-oriented that some parents feel excluded by the law, which has led to the creation of activist groups such as Fathers4Justice.’ In common with the Gazette, she was at the now notorious Law Society conference in Manchester in November 2004 when Fathers4Justice invaded the auditorium and one activist hand- cuffed himself to the then children’s minister, Margaret Hodge. Stowe has achieved much,


graduating from a converted cobbler’s shop in east Leeds – albeit one, she tells the Gazette, modelled along the lines of the 1986-94 TV legal drama series LA Law – to an office abutting London’s Gray’s Inn and with several other offices in the north of England. And yet this reputedly ‘formidable’ lawyer retains much of the optimism, tempered by modesty, of the Leeds grammar school girl who, in an era when women were less likely to do such audacious things, read law at university and started her own law firm.


One can’t help but suspect that


those three masked robbers were let off lightly.


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