A point I wish I’d made in my consultation response in respect of the rise of the litigant in person and the impact on access to justice:
The family jurisdiction is often thought of (by non-family lawyers at any rate) as law-lite (we know this because chancery and criminal lawyers take especial delight in telling us this at every opportunity. Such is the limit of excitement at the drier end of the bar). Insofar as there is not a vast quantity of black letter law, and insofar as one cannot rely upon statute to find the answer to any particular question, this is absolutely so.
But it does not follow from this that family law is easy. I am discovering this as I try to gather together the last sections of my handbook for litigants in person – the more I explain, the more there is to explain. There may be comparatively little technicality, but there is a lot to explain that is not written down in any document, other than a vast and confusing matrix of caselaw.
Family law is a broadly discretionary jurisdiction, where statute offers little more than checklists and all encompassing criteria to be weighed and balanced depending on the unique factual matrix of each case. It takes lawyers years of experience to build up a feel for where the judgment of the court is likely to fall, to become familiar with the mass of caselaw, which guides but which rarely offers any definitive or determinative guidance of broad application and is often heavily caveated as “fact specific”. A family lawyer must be aware of nuance and factual subtlety, of the foibles of the individual tribunal or of local practice, of the raw practical limitations on what the court can achieve in the real world, of the inherent unpredictability of this kind of discretionary jurisdiction. Predicting outcomes is often impossible, judging prospects and what stance to adopt can be exquisitely difficult.