Trends in 2026 – Spear’s

Click here to read the full article: The best family lawyers in 2026 – Spear’s

Alex and Isabella’s comments have been reproduced below with kind permission.

Alex highlights the strain on the family court system, describing the challenge of securing a hearing through his comments in ‘The flight from the courtroom’

“No subject surfaced more often in this year’s research than the state of the family courts. Practitioners across the country no longer treat the court as the natural place to resolve a dispute. Securing a hearing, says Payne Hicks Beach director Alex O’Dwyer Curran, has become ‘like trying to get a GP appointment’. The system, agrees Lois Langton of Howard Kennedy, is simply ‘broken’.”

Whilst Isabella emphasises that the greatest successes are often the cases resolved privately through her comments in ‘The privacy premium’.

“The biggest achievement, argues Isabella Savill of Payne Hicks Beach, ‘is the cases that you resolve without getting anywhere near a courtroom’. The corollary, and a useful corrective to how the profession markets itself, is that the most significant work in this Index is invisible intentionally.”

For more information, contact with your usual contact in the Family department, or call 020 7465 4300