-- The Lord Chancellor's plans to introduce standard fees for family cases are too crude, says Hilary SiddleFamily practitioners will be concerned about the principle involved in standard fees for family cases and about the practicality of the proposals.

These would provide a single standard fee of £884 for most family and child care cases, with the exception of domestic violence.

The Law Society will ensure that the Lord Chancellor's proposals are rigorously analysed and that the Society's response to the Lord Chancellor sets out practitioners' concerns in full.

There are some criteria that the standard fee system would have to meet to be workable.

In particular:-- The level of fees would need to be sufficient to enable efficient practitioners to do a competent job.-- Separate standard fees would need to be established for different categories of work.-- The system should avoid excessive gains and losses in individual cases.-- The cases covered must be predictable enough for a standard fee system to be workable and follow a logical pattern of costs.The present proposals fall well short of these objectives.

The government should explain:-- Why it is introducing standard fees when significant changes in the procedure for ancillary relief cases, domestic violence and family work generally are soon to be introduced?-- How a single standard fee could cover disputes about ancillary relief, residence and public law care cases?-- How the figures proposed for standard fees could be reconciled with the Legal Aid Board's information about the average cost of cases?-- Why standard fees for ancillary relief cases are being proposed when the government's consultants admit that there is no logical pattern of costs for those cases?-- Why no extra is to be paid for advocacy unless an outside advocate is instructed.The Law Society needs to make sure that the Lord Chancellor's Department and others concerned are aware of the danger that the Lord Chancellor's crude proposals would present to t he continued availability of high quality services for legal aid litigants in family cases.-- Solicitors must get to grips with family mediation because it will not go away, advised John CornwellFamily mediation is here to stay.

Mediation has settled into a recognised profession and although its rules, codes of practice and training habits vary to some degree, there is a considerable level of agreement among the organisations concerned about their contents.

In the family context, there are two streams of mediation: that which is broadly concerned with children, and mediation on 'all issues'.

It would be a bold lawyer who insisted that lawyers had unique experience that justified the invariable presence of a lawyer on child-related issues.

However, it would be a very bold mediator who could suggest that mediation is desirable without some lawyer involvement in 'all issues' mediation.The government has agreed to pay for mediation.

The rates are not yet known but it is difficult to see how it could be remunerated at less than the rates now paid by the Legal Aid Board to solicitors.

Private mediation will doubtless become much more common as more mediators are trained and as the public becomes more familiar with the concept.The notion that all family matters are amenable to mediation is wrong.

No mediation has any prospect of success unless there is some acceptance by both parties of a common objective.

Therefore, all solicitors are going to have to become familiar with the task of assessing where mediation can be useful.

The profession must be prepared to work with other disciplines, keep an open mind and train itself to be available where required.-- David Salter examines the changes to financial relief that were introduced by the Family Law Act 1996The changes introduced by the Family Law Act 1996 in relation to financial relief are more extensive than might at first be thought.

The hardship bar has now been extended to all divorces.

Hardship must now be 'substantial' rather than 'grave' and hardship to a child suffices.

Also, s 25(2)(g) of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 has been amended.

The court is now directed to have regard to the conduct of each of the parties.

This applies 'whatever the nature of the conduct and whether it occurred during the marriage or after the separation, dissolution or annulment of the marriage'.

Politically, it would appear that this amendment was accepted in order to address the perception that conduct was not, in practical terms, taken into account by the courts.

However, the government argues that the amendment does nothing more than emphasise the current law by stressing that the court must consider conduct of whatever nature, not simply conduct in the course of ancillary relief proceedings.

Now the court can also compel a husband to make a capital payment on variation to extinguish a wife's periodical payments.However, the most fundamental change in the financial context is that financial issues must be resolved before the marriage ends.

A menu of options is prescribed to fulfil this requirement.

This includes, in addition to a court order or formal negotiated agreement, a simple declaration by both parties that they have made their financial arrangements.

Alternatively, there can be a declaration by one of the parties, to which the other makes no objection, that neither party has significant assets nor intends to make application for financial provision and that there are, therefore, no financial arrangements to be made.

It remains to be seen to what extent parties will repent at lei sure over informal agreements reached so as to enable a divorce order to be made at the earliest opportunity.