"With our exceptional contacts and market awareness we make sure your choices are smart" David Cowdry, Partner

Our Family Team
Caring for you as your life changes

 
Having one of the Storrar Cowdry family team on your side means you are in safe, strong and sensitive hands from the moment of your very first contact with us.

Our widely admired family team have an unrivalled regional and national reputation for our winning combination of:

• Taking care of your interests and securing your children’s future
• Total discretion
• Dealing with the specific pressures that go with family issues
• Dividing up wealth, large and complex estates
• Helping you avoid painful, unnecessary and expensive legal actions
• Getting the best result the law can offer you
• Deep understanding how family courts operate in the UK
• world-wide family law jurisdiction expertise

Understanding what you will be going through means that every action we take is designed to get the quickest and best result the law allows.

 

Our negotiation skills are finely tuned and well known. So we can settle matters even when they appear to be acrimonious/bitter and almost impossible to solve. We can draw on many years of experience and completely up to date knowledge of family law.

 

Other solicitors and barristers know of and respect us. And our longstanding relationships within the family law legal world means your case will be listened to sympathetically wherever we present it.

We can safely guide you through:

• Divorce, separation or annulment of your marriage
• Financial and property disputes
• Pension splitting and maintenance
• Child support, residence, contact and parental responsibility
• Unmarried couple’s disputes

Collaborative Law for Family Clients

Two partners from our Family Team are trained to undertake Collaborative work with Family clients.

Collaborative practice is a new way of resolving family law matters including divorce, separation and parenting disputes. It is a good option for people who want to avoid the uncertainties of the court-based system. Provided everyone enters the process in good faith, the process is faster and less acrimonious than court proceedings.

How does it work?

Both you and your partner work with specially trained collaborative lawyers. You each receive legal advice and guidance and, together with your lawyers, discuss and resolve issues through face-to-face meetings. The process can also include other professionals including counsellors, mediators and financial specialists to help you reach agreement.

 

How do we avoid the threat of court action during negotiations?

Everyone signs an agreement disqualifying your collaborative lawyers from representing you at court if the collaborative process breaks down. Neither of the lawyers, nor their respective firms, can then act for you in any court-based proceedings. You would need to instruct new lawyers to proceed to court.

 

What are the advantages of negotiating outside the court process?

You can set your own agenda according to what matters most to you and your family. You won't risk key decisions about your future being made by a complete stranger - a judge. Because you are not waiting for dates from the court, you can work at your own pace and resolve matters more quickly but you will still have a duty to provide full and frank disclosure of all assets so negotiations can be honest and open.

 

The collaborative process also helps maintain channels of communication between you and your partner - this is particularly important if you need to co-operate as parents after divorce or separation. You may even manage to maintain a friendship with your former partner at the end of the process.

 

Collaborative practitioners are a support group of lawyers and other professionals, providing a creative approach to the legal, emotional and practical problems of family breakdown. A group ('pod'!) meets locally in the Chester area.

 

In summary...

• Negotiate your own solutions with professional support
• A process as unique as you are
• Long-lasting agreements which can adapt as circumstances change
• Less stress - you decide the pace and remain in control of the process

For more information please contact Elaine Richardson or Lindsay Yateman