Festering Family Court system needs fresh triage approach

Intolerable delays of up to three years are plaguing the Family Court and are placing the system under critical and undue pressure.

There's a chronic shortage of judges, and a lack of legal assistance is only serving to delay matters even further. If one party is legally represented their legal costs are often escalated as the other party fails to comply with Court orders and time frames.

If both parties are not legally represented the Court frequently is required to adjourn cases that are not ready or spend extra time assisting the parties to understand the process. When one or both unrepresented parties have a mental illness or drug/alcohol issues the process becomes almost farcical.

Many parents are forced to walk away from their children because they can no longer cope with the legal system.

People are not pursuing a property settlement they are entitled to because they cannot get assistance and they cannot deal with the paperwork and the subsequent time required off work to litigate and claim their share.

In the long run people are reaching agreement without legal assistance or even advice and they then need to return to Court to amend or undo the agreements because they overlooked or misunderstood, or simply couldn't comply.

Which then clogs up the Court system again.

It's time for a brand new approach to this long-standing and festering problem.

After 20 years of practising Family Law I think I'm qualified to give the Federal Government some well-intentioned free advice on addressing the Family Court fiasco and here it is???. They need to fund a separation "triage" system to assess separated people early on. Think of it like the "Fresh Separation Clinic" - where people who are newly separated are entitled to minimum cost high-quality legal advice.

They can then proceed on the right track, with the right advice. People who get the right advice early are far more likely to settle. It is difficult to change someone's expectations when they have for months or years, held an incorrect belief as to their legal position, or they have never had advice at all and are simply using friends and family for advice. There is no point throwing more money at Legal Aid and the Court system unless we can assess and treat early.

Ideally the clinic should be manned by experienced Family Lawyers. Every year lawyers do the equivalent of 35 hours per year free legal work (or pro bono) each, so within the legal profession there is certainly a culture of giving back to the community. Presently many community legal centres are manned by private lawyers on a rotating roster and these positions are often sought after as it can be a source of new work for good quality lawyers.

The cost to clients should be nominal - enough to stamp out time wasters and no shows, but not enough that it is inaccessible for everyone.

In the US there is a centre called Justice Caf?? which provides affordable legal services. This centre makes use of the plethora of law graduates in the US and enables people to pay for things like document preparation and court representation as individual packages.

In Australia there are a significant number of law students graduating each year, with only about 30 per cent of them getting graduate jobs in the legal industry. Many of them would welcome the opportunity to spend some time in a legal clinic to gain experience, even if it is on an administrative/assisting basis. In addition there is significant innovation in the legal sector that would enable clients to complete a lot of the information required on line and the lawyers would then be able to focus on what the best path for each individual would be.

In 2017 it seems incomprehensible that each year 25 per cent of people experience a legal problem significant enough to require legal representation but that many of these people have no way of accessing legal assistance. A Fresh Separation Clinic would go a long way to addressing this problem.

Catherine Leach is a family lawyer and managing director at Leach Legal