Divorces rarely run smoothly, in fact when couples divorce they tend to be very bitter arguments where divorce lawyers are the only winners.

This trend was never highlighted so perfectly, and publically, than the divorce between Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills. As a result of the constant stream of bitter, acrimonious divorces, a leading high court judge has called for an end to the trend.

Mr Justice Coleridge commented that as recently as five years ago the number of lawyers in the UK using the American styled ‘collaborative-law’ was very low. However now as many as 1,250 lawyers across the UK are using the approach, which avoids the conflict seen in many divorce cases.

The judge was speaking in front of 100 lawyers, who’d gathered together to celebrate the five years since the new approach has been used in the UK.

He commented:

We lawyers are by nature and training adversarial and sometimes aggressive.

That was in a way inevitable because clients wanted support and to be told “they will come out all right, that they will win,” he said.

But although separation and divorce were “always horrendously stressful — some say worse than the death of a spouse”, to use the new process to ensure the minimum of distress was “hugely rewarding and a great deal more worthwhile than battering the other side into submission or fighting to conclusion”.

Clive Bellmore