THIS blog post contains better, bigger, shinier, wittier, more erudite and amusing yet useful insights into Sharland and Gohil than any other legal blog post.
Nope. Sorry. My mind’s a blank. But I made ya look. 😉
THIS blog post contains better, bigger, shinier, wittier, more erudite and amusing yet useful insights into Sharland and Gohil than any other legal blog post.
Nope. Sorry. My mind’s a blank. But I made ya look. 😉
Naughty!
Just a counterpoint:
You and Helena Kennedy may well have to wait 50 years if the best female that can be appointed is the likes of Brenda Hoggett. What a disaster of a track record she has in family law ! Talk about millions suffering – she’s refined it to a fine art.
And why are you – and others in the profession – only now speaking about and promoting ‘pro bono’ assistance for litigants in person in family cases. Is it just because legal aid has been cut or is it more precisely that legal aid has been cut for women ?
Cutting it for women only puts them on the same level playing field as men – and nobody 20 years ago thought about promoting ‘pro bono’ assistance for them. I wonder why ?
Surely it can’t be female lawyers exhibiting their sexism ? Where were you, if you want to excel and want to help people who need help, when on a daily basis, 50% of divorcing couples had a right to legal aid and the other 50% did not because of their sex ?
I don’t really think I understand your comment Robert. We’ve been doing pro bono for years, it was well established before I came to the bar and I have always done pro bono work, sometimes for men sometimes for women. It is no new thing. The difference is more demand. Legal aid has been cut for both men and women, but arguably the greatest impact is likely to be on men (numerically speaking) as they are often the unrepresented respondents to allegations of abuse or violence. I don’t see it as a level playing field for anyone and I don’t accept the premise of your comment that pro bono is somehow linked to women. There was never a situation where 50% of couples had a right to legal aid and the other did not because of sex, although men were often excluded on means grounds.
But in answer to your question, where was I? I was doing pro bono in between getting paid, sometimes accepting reduced fees for private paying clients who could not afford more (much to the disgust of my clerks), sometimes doing legal aid cases at rates which were higher then than they are now even though the complexity has increased and the expectations in terms of time spent before and after hearings doing ancillary preparation and post-hearing work have increased.
I don’t really know much about Brenda Hoggett, but even if the premise were right I don’t see why it would reflect on women advocates as a whole – unless of course you adopt the base assumption that women are generally inferior and she is a mere illustration of that. It seems to me that is what your comment implies and I reject it wholeheartedly. It is both offensive and wrong.
AND, I might say, it is the perpetual explicit and unspoken guilt tripping of those involved in the family justice system to do more and more all the time that runs us into the ground and is leading to people leaving, breaking down and under-performing. We are WELL AWARE of unmet need and desperate parents who want help. Why do you think I even got to the position I have described in this post if I didn’t give a shit? It is the same across the legal, judicial and social work professions. The self employed don’t have the “luxury” of long term sick leave.