The other day I put a polite but hopefully firm OOO on my emails, explaining that I am not taking on new work and will deal only with emails relating to existing commitments. This morning I seriously contemplated rewording it to simply read: "For the love of god, STOP. EMAILING. ME!" I flirted with the idea of adding some swears as a parting flourish (I love a good swear, it's therapeutic). Of course, I haven't done that. It's nobody else's fault that I need to draw a line. And they aren't psychic. Also, I am a professional. But I have reached a stage where for the sake of my sanity and those around me, and to make sure I do right by my clients, my family and myself, I need to impose some serious boundaries. Otherwise I am at risk of providing a poor standard of work, parenting, partnering and daughtering. So I'm pausing on new commitments. All of them. Our household, our whole family is undergoing a period of acute difficulty, following on from a period of chronic stress and change,...

I'm please to say that the Second Edition of our book Transparency in the Family Court - Publicity and Privacy in Practice is now available for pre-order from Bloomsbury Professional Press for £85. This time around it comes in a fetching shade of pond green. As you may imagine, there has been quite a lot to update since 2018, including the Transparency Review and its sequelae and various case law developments. It's a fast moving field at the moment (good news) but Julie, Paul and I have made it as up to date as we could at the cut off date for going to print! The only things it doesn't capture are two things which happened after the guillotine, are the announcement of exactly which new courts were joining the reporting pilot from Jan 24, and a case called Wong which references (we think) the first example of a prosecution under s97 Children Act 1989 - though even that was discontinued when the Attorney General decided contempt was a better way to proceed. Order your copy here....

I've been blessed with some lovely cooperative and charming opponents recently. And few who have been grouchy, rude and irrational. I'm a firm believer that being that person doesn't pay off: it isn't an effective strategy that assists clients. It signals a loss of objectivity or a lack of confidence, it shuts down the opportunities to reach compromise, it provokes retaliatory responses and escalation and it irritates judges. I don't pretend I am the perfect opponent. We can all have our off days. But I try not to be that person. And over 20 years of testing, I'm confident that this approach is best for my clients as well as being best for my wellbeing. I feel sorry for the opponents I occasionally encounter who are habitually unpleasant or difficult, and who don't do dialogue. This job is stressful enough without expending additional energy projecting some hard (wo)man persona day in day out. It makes me tired just watching it being performed and I have to struggle not to disengage....