Guide to family negotiation

We passionately believe that agreed outcomes are better than unnecessary conflict. Your family lawyer's ability to negotiate calmly and effectively on your behalf is a key factor in achieving this.

Reaching a fair divorce settlement

You and your partner will hopefully be able to agree on many of the issues that come up when you're separating, but there are bound to be areas where you don't see eye-to-eye and may benefit from divorce negotiation.

You may agree on what should happen with your main home or other properties you own but have differences on how the family business or your pensions should be dealt with. You may need to find common ground about the time each of you spends with your children. Even if you're not exploring these issues through mediation or collaborative meetings, they still need to be negotiated.

Our aim is to help you reach a fair divorce settlement without any formal court proceedings - and certainly without a contested final hearing before a judge. Whether through correspondence, telephone calls, meetings with your partner's solicitors, drafting documents or in court, you can be confident in our ability to negotiate effectively on your behalf.

Negotiation is about much more than knowing the law. It's about really understanding what matters to you and having a clear picture of what you want to achieve. This is what you can expect from us.

Our experience

We recently helped a client reach an agreement with her husband involving an extremely valuable private family business as well as a number of homes and other investments and assets.

They both agreed right at the beginning that they wanted to deal with everything amicably and to protect their children as much as possible. They certainly didn't want a fight in court. But, before they could finalise it all, there was still a great deal to do in relation to valuations, complex tax, corporate law issues and legal transfers.

Working with colleagues in our corporate and property teams, we negotiated everything through face to face meetings and constructive discussions with our client's husband and his team.

As a result, our client achieved financial independence through a combination of property, cash and shares in the business that represented half of the agreed values. More importantly as far as our client was concerned, the approach that we took meant that both parties were able to communicate effectively during the negotiations and afterwards. They were able to continue to work together in the business and crucially also as parents.

To find out more about how you can benefit from seeking the assistance of an expert negotiator, speak to our family lawyer team today.