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Making reasonable provision in your will for those who depend upon you financially is a duty, not a choice. A judge made that point in coming to the aid of two sisters who were left in acute need when their father bequeathed them nothing. In a will made four months before he died, their father left the entirety of his estate – consisting of his home, which was worth £355,000 – to their brother, who lived in the property. The sisters launched proceedings under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and...

Transparency / open Justice in the Family Courts   An appeal from His Honour Judge Oliver sitting at Central Family Court against findings he made in a Care case to the Court of Appeal. Heard by Lord Justices  Baker and Warby and Lady Justice Simler.   A reserved judgment in a case of such complexity and involving very serious findings with life long implications for our 18 year old client, the alleged perpetrator of sexual abuse,  should have been in writing. The family, the professionals involved and  in future the children must...

The belief that you cease to be a UK resident for tax purposes simply by staying out of the country for a certain number of days is a common fallacy. As a TV personality, entrepreneur and property investor found out to his cost, the legal test is very much more nuanced than that. The man was born in Australia but prospered mightily after relocating to England in the 1980s. He was assessed for over £1 million in Capital Gains Tax (CGT) after selling various UK properties during the 2012/2013 tax...

Many adopted people feel driven to embark on long and demanding quests to find their birth parents. In one case, decades of painstaking research paid off when a woman in her late 70s was granted a court order that completed her sense of identity. The woman was placed with adoptive parents within days of her birth in 1945. The couple told her at an early age that she was adopted and that her birth parents were each married to someone else, making it impossible for her to remain with them....