We find it hard to believe we’ve bent your ears for almost 1,000 posts, but as the landmark draws near, we would love to do something really special.

We’ve added some ideas for your below, but we would love to hear your thoughts, and if you have better suggestions, we’d love to hear them, too.

For our 1,000th post, we could:

• Invite you all to write down one thing about your child or children you know that makes them special (to you)
• Try to complete a family law related challenge you have for us!
• Ask us any question and we will do our best to answer them all for the duration of the day. We will put all questions inside the post with our answers below; you can ask us about anything, related to family law, the work we do or even our thoughts on things

Got any better ideas! Spring ’em on us……

14 posts to go and counting……

Yes, it’s a commercially driven, gimmicky attempt at getting suckers (like us), to part with our money once a year, but we never miss an opportunity to spread some love, no matter how contrite.

So, we would like to wish all of you a happy day, filled with love and laughter and for those of you who cannot be with the ones they love today,we are thinking of you.

Valentine’s Day is in many ways a profit driven holiday of sorts, but the more subtle implications have some merit. It’s a day which reminds people that love, despite a lack of success in bottling, selling and generally manipulating it is still made, given and felt. It’s a sacred commodity which we know deep down in our hearts can’t be sold or made from scratch, but it can be shared and still, despite our ever growing numbness to it, is the key to our survival, and our evolution.

One of the things I look forward to on Valentine’s Day, is my gorgeous eCard from The Attorney at Love, Jim Duzak. He’s something of a celebrity over in America and he is one of the kindest and cleverest legal minds I’ve had the privilege of meeting. We share an exchange of cards on this day, though it may not be quite what you think. Jim and I are not declaring our love for one another, our cards are just small fibre optic-driven tokens of kindness, in a world where that sort of emotion is more readily viewed as superfluous to life. Jim doesn’t think so, and I love being reminded that there are still people out there who understand the importance of a strong heart.

We hope you’ll enjoy today, for your own personal reasons, and if you’re looking for some last minute tips on telling someone you care, we’ve added some ideas below for you!

• E cards – we love the ones over at Jimpix; fun but never cheesy. (And free to send)
• Powerpoint slideshows – yup, it sounds geeky and all kinds of Wrong, but if you add music, animations and slide design into the mix you can make the best Walk Down Memory Lane slideshow for your loved one (it went down a treat with my son this morning)
• Glitter Text – you don’t need to buy a card or flowers, this instant glitterification tool means you can dazzle your date with some pre-dinner sparkles (if you’re not planning on giving the real kind :)) We’ve added a demo below… you can even sparklify handmade cards online with Glitterfy, a personal fave of ours.

We would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas! Our posts may slow down a little over the next few days, but in the meantime, please feel free to browse around the site and make yourself at home, on any number of soft, fluffy sofas we have left lying around for you on the blog….

Why not check out our Children In The Vine? It’s a serialised drama based on real cases we have worked on and some of the things we’ve written about defy belief – except that they are all real and happened in the real world.

Or have a browse through our growing Encyclopaedia on Family and The Law, for interesting articles and varied views on the system, all written without masses of scary jargon.

If you feel like a little reassurance that the system is not all bad, why not take a look at some of our Judges of the Week – nobody’s perfect, but these judges come close.

And finally, if you want to press your earlobe to our chest to hear the faint sound of a heartbeat, why not come on over to our Twitter feed, where we will be tweeting throughout the week about all sorts of things, most of them Christmassy!

As always our thoughts go out to those families who will be without their children and grandchildren this year. We are thinking of you and hope that 2014 is a better year, filled with hope, happiness and good health for you all.

With warmth,

Natasha

This morning’s post about vexatious litigants having their own dedicated list on the Ministry of Justice’s website got us thinking about transparency and the importance of being upfront and fair.

Having written a post a little while ago on lawyer discipline and how professional misconduct gets recorded in the justice system, it occurred to us that there was a parallel between lawyers who find themselves at the sharp end of the law, and litigants who vex the system. Both parties share something in common: they are individuals who present a perceived threat to the system.

This then got us thinking about the ways in which each group is handled by the system, and whether the treatment is the same for both. It becomes quite clear that this is not the case.

Vexatious Litigants are added to their list and left to languish upon it for what would appear to be an entire lifetime (you can see from the dates some of the orders were made, orders which bar the litigants from issuing any more proceedings in civil courts, that a great many of these litigants are now dead). But it’s a different story for naughty solicitors and barristers.

Hop on over to the Bar Standards Board and the old page which shared information on disciplinary hearings and bad boy barristers is gone. In its place is a new, rather more nebulous affair, which allows you to search for a barrister by name, and from there to see whether or not they have been subject to disciplinary hearings, suspension and even disbarred. So far so good. But then, you read the small print,  below.

What transpires is the following: unlike the Vexatious Litigant Roll Call, which now numbers two lists (the first list which we posted this morning, and a newer list which is currently available under another heading entitled Civil Restraint Orders) and which is an ever-growing list of people reaching as far back as 1956, with neither site appearing to suggest that the lists will at any time be culled either post the life of the order, or at all, the Bar Standards Board page tells us:

“Please note historical disciplinary findings imposed before 2002 are not included on our website. Also, findings which do not include a period of suspension from practice or disbarment are removed from the website after two years.”

And much the same is said over at the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which also explains:

• Not all regulatory decisions are published—read more about our publication policy.
• We began publishing decisions in early 2008.
• Decisions remain on the site for three years.
• For the most up-to-date and complete picture of an individual’s regulatory record, please contact us.
• Read more about how we regulate.

We have no personal objection when it comes to removing names of naughty lawyers if the infractions are minor, we all make mistakes, and it does appear from the lists for naughty lawyers that particularly big blunders do not get removed from the site, which in turn protects members of the public and helps the profession, by being transparent, and so building trust.

However it is not clear from either lawyers’ sites whether big blunders prior to 2002 for barristers and prior to 2008 for solicitors are left on site (we have not had time to check). If lawyers who have been suspended from practice or disbarred prior to 2002/ 2008 are not on the list, this would completely defeat the purpose of such registers, and could result in an unsuspecting client hiring and paying for advice from a lawyer who has been barred from practice. And if, as the SRA suggests, all decisions are removed from their site after three years, where does that leave the consumer, as he trawls through the register to find out if the solicitor he is about to hire is actually fit to practice?

And what of the lists of vexatious litigants? It is important for transparency to be a two-way street, but when people who are clearly no longer alive still have their names on a list, we must ask ourselves whether transparency in this area is a one-way street.

Vexatious litigants, unlike lawyers, have no details about their case on these sites, no information is provided as to why and how they continued to issue proceedings. These lists are treated as a one-dimensional affair, whereas the registers for lawyers are filled with helpful details about any existing infractions. That detail is reassuring, allowing members of the public to understand better what mistake has been made, and whether or not it is material to their requirements. Vexatious litigants do not get the chance to explain; they are merely vexatious, rather than, for example, misguided. And as the list is for the benefit of lawyers and court staff, one has to wonder whether the system is doing itself any favours by being so basic about these litigants.

It’s an interesting area of the justice system. How we perceive one another, during that first phone call, meeting or court hearing is a critical moment which has an enduring impact. If we were just a little less black and white about things, perhaps transparency would get the chance it deserves to heal at least some of the wounds inside an ailing system.

We’ve just come across this rather fascinating list on the Ministry of Justice’s website and had to share it.

It is a list of people who have been forbidden by a High Court judge to issue civil proceedings in England and Wales without prior permission.

These people are known as Vexatious Litigants, and the index offers a comprehensive list of all those individuals who have been subject to such an order (barring them from issuing proceedings without permission), and the date the order was made.

There are of course people who are terribly upset inside the system and yet may not necessarily have good reason to keep on down the litigation road, but by the same token, many people caught up in this list are simply trying to ‘get through’ to a system which is far too narrow, sometimes, in scope and sophistication, to get to the heart of the matter. Vexatious Litigants, like well-meaning lawyers who make mistakes, are not all of a type.

An interesting list, and one which no doubt will grow over time, as it has done and continues to do.

Okay, so it’s not a prototype for a human-size praline maker or a spam bot that eats all the spam on the net, but it’s pretty darn close, and as you will see on the left hand side of our blog, we are talking about our all-new, mucho fun Twitter timeline, which is now fully interactive and ready to rock and roll.

Just have a scroll down our side bar (no rude jokes), and you will see the latest addition to our addiction to all things techie-ish….

Now, you don’t even need to leave the comfy confines of our blog to tweet us. You can harass us twice over for the price of a one shot deal – enjoy…..

At Researching Reform, we use the social media site Twitter, or micro blogging site as it is sometimes called, for work and play and to our minds, it is the best of the best in its genre. But not everyone agrees. As technology is so much a part of what we do here, we thought we would share an email conversation we had with a friend a little while back. Our friend, as you will see, is not impressed with Twitter. Could he be right? We’ll let you decide…

The McDonald’s of Conversation (Our Friend’s E Mail):

“I have been mocked on a number of occasions due to the fact that I read a daily newspaper (rather than the one pod) that is left of field in its reporting, and a tad hairy with tree hugging in its approach – you guessed right I partake in the purchasing and reading a copies of the Guardian, at length.
 
 
As a chap of good character (never trust anyone that believes and announces they are intrinsically good) I’m all for a good old laugh at one’s family, work colleagues, this country with its unremitting slate gray skies etc, but more importantly having the ability to find oneself funny or preposterous (self-deprecation) is an all important character strength. One of the reasons I read the Guardian is the need to have my hardwired conservative values continually challenged, but the main reason is; its ability (better than most UK papers but not as good as the International Herald and Tribune) to dissect the issue, argue in favour or against all points of view and essentially take the time for due reflection. This is why I like reading these particular newspapers and why I like dinner parties, so we have an educated opportunity to test our thinking, debate the real issues and potentially leave the subject with more than one opinion. The anti social aspect of the net and 140 word boundaries (fascists) will never allow for profound debate. 
 
Why I don’t Tweet as much as others is (1) trying to cover a subject or event live on Twitter—especially if you are a participant, as I have been (IMF)—doesn’t allow time to check facts or seek out an alternative points of view or think for more than a few seconds about what to say.  (2) There’s not much you can do when you make a mistake on Twitter, particularly if you are dealing with a complex subject. (3) Whist this social phenomenon has undoubtedly been very good (disputable) for modern-day democracy (think Egypt) it has equally created extremely volatile reactions such as the recent youth uprising in the London and the rest of the UK. 
 
Twitter is the McDonalds of conversation, the KFC of protest, the Nescafe of observation…
 
Observation and time is needed, more today than ever before, mankind is moving too quickly/life is far more complex – I worry the important stuff is being missed by our ever-increasing need to consume huge amounts of data/information, which is usually very poorly reported. In-depth review and observation is being lost and I’m worried. 
 
But then I love bookshops and paperbacks (you guessed it I don’t have a kindle)
am I  old-fashioned or is it more likely I prefer the quality of time to think, to view, be wrong, to observe, to listen for more than 20 seconds…???”

The World’s Greatest Library (Our Reply): 

We have been asked by Maggie Tuttle, founder of Children Screaming To Be Heard to give a mention to a conference they are holding in September, which will focus on the care system. It will be held on 4th September, from 9-6pm, at the Old Barn Hotel in Grantham.

Whilst we are not endorsing the event’s speakers, some of which belong to organisations Researching Reform does not support, we thought it was important to share the information. You can find further details on the flyer below.