Sandra Davis' Week: ADR with teeth?

Part 1.1 of the new Family Procedure Rules 2010 ("FPR") repeats the overriding objective in ancillary relief proceedings contained at rule 2.51D of the old Family Proceedings Rules. More than this it extends it to all family litigation. The most instructive aspects of Part 1.1 is the acknowledgement that dealing with a case justly includes "saving expense" and "allotting to it an appropriate share of the court's resources while taking into account the need to allot resources to other cases".

Hence the Coalition's announcement that the implementation of the FPR on 6 April will in most cases involving children and money following parental separation be accompanied by the introduction of the pre-action protocol for mediation information and assessment contained in Practice Direction 3A.

The reasoning behind this is set out in the Practice Direction: "There is a general acknowledgement that an adversarial court process is not always best suited to the resolution of family disputes ...

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