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Couples can sometimes be tempted to enter into property transactions together without taking legal advice, on the basis that the love and trust between them will last forever. However, a High Court ruling strikingly showed how misguided such assumptions can be. During the course of a relationship that lasted more than 30 years and yielded three children, a five-bedroom house was purchased for over £1.5 million and placed in the woman's sole name. The unmarried couple's finances had become heavily intermingled whilst they were together, but they had never asked...

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) may appear a very big battalion indeed but, with the right legal advice, individuals can succeed in overturning their decisions. Exactly that happened in a case concerning a couple who lost over £6 million in a disastrous attempt to buy a luxury holiday home overseas. The couple entered into a contract to purchase off plan, for $25.9 million, two neighbouring villas on the island of Barbados as a holiday home for their family. They paid a deposit of over $5 million, and stage payments as...

What exactly is a will? The High Court addressed that fundamental issue in resolving a bitter family dispute in respect of where a much-loved son and husband should be buried. Following the man's death from cancer, his mother insisted that he should be laid to rest according to custom in his 300-year-old ancestral burial ground, located in his country of origin. His wife was equally adamant that he should be interred in a cemetery near his family home in England, where he had lived for almost 20 years before his...

One of the hardest tasks that family judges have to undertake is to remove children from the care of parents who are incapable of looking after them. However, as one case showed, adoption of children outside their natural families is only ever a last resort and there is always the possibility of redemption. The case concerned a 14-month-old girl whose mother had been an alcoholic since she was in her teens. Having lived largely in care during her childhood, the mother had appeared before criminal courts for offences fuelled by...