In any family law, de-facto matter or estate matter, we will ask you to enter into an agreement with us, which sets out in detail the basis of our charging and which we will ask you to sign before undertaking any specific work. We will generally charge you for work undertaken by a lawyer and non-professional…
The nature of family law work over the last two decades has been slowly but steadily changing, as parties in de facto relationships continue to rise in numbers, while the numbers of formal marriages continue to fall or have plateaued. Since the 1970’s, there has been a steady fall in the number of “crude”…
Several years ago, I acted for a husband in a family law property matter. He was in his 70s, a senior professional man. The wife was in her 50s. They had one adult child. As sometimes happens, there was not a lot of co-operation from one party, in this case the wife, in pursuing the matter. She was…
Over the past five years, couples have approached the Family Court of Australia seeking a declaration of parentage arising from surrogacy arrangements. But despite approaching the Court with very similar circumstances, the divergence in outcomes reflect the tensions between state and federal legislation,…
In Australia, the Child Support Registrar of the Department of Human Services (‘the Registrar’) is central authority responsible for overseeing the administration of child support and maintenance obligations. The administration and collection of child support is primarily pursuant to two pieces of legislation…
With the globalisation of family law, practitioners will often come across the difficult task of dealing with multi jurisdictional cases such as overseas orders, overseas property, overseas service, jurisdictional matters, enforcement, international marriage, divorce, custody and child support. This…
“For nearly 400 years, the policy of the law has been to fix definite time limits (usually six but often three years) for prosecuting civil claims. The enactment of time limitations has been driven by the general perception that "[w]here there is delay the whole quality of justice deteriorates." “The…