It has been a busy few months in the family courts, with a number of high-profile cases hitting the news. Previous articles are available in the monthly Journal archive from both September and October of this year, and we would encourage you to also read these to help you get to grips with this rapidly developing area of law.

1) Divorce and dishonesty

Two ex-wives who ‘accepted’ unfair divorce settlements appeared in the Supreme Court in October and their cases will now form a precedent for how dishonesty when disclosing assets will be treated in family courts.

Last month we looked at the advisability of checking the financial viability of the parties in a conveyancing transaction before contracts are actually exchanged. This month I want to deal with another pre-contract area which can possibly have disastrous consequences if you are not careful.

Case management systems are designed to monitor the life cycle of a case in order to manage the workflow of everybody dealing with the case. This makes the most effective use of everyone’s time. There are lots of different systems available to perform this task, but they all have a lot in common when it comes to the features on offer.

Different systems have different types of law firms in mind. There are software systems, which are specifically programmed for small law firms that have only a few cases on the go at any one time, and there are other systems for larger law firms handling many cases at once. There are also some systems which are designed to cater for specialisms and niches within the legal profession, such as medical law or intellectual property law.

On one level, there are as many answers to this question as there are legal secretaries and lawyers. Every working relationship is different, and most of us will have found out that what perfectly suits one relationship doesn’t work at all in another.

However, as someone who has worked both as a Legal Secretary and as a lawyer, I think that there is one quality that most lawyers would agree is essential to the makeup of a really good Legal Secretary or PA. This is a quality that transcends personality types and practice specialisms, and you need it whether you are working for a family lawyer or a commercial lawyer, and whether your boss is permanently frantic or completely chilled. Looked at from the other side of the desk, your fundamental skill is to make your boss’s job easier, however you achieve it.

In April 2015, new charges came into effect which have dramatically increased the cost of court proceedings in England and Wales. Since these charges were put in place, there has been much protest from civil liberty groups and legal professionals. Over 50 magistrates across England and Wales have stepped down as a direct result of the charges. They believe that the increase in the price of justice violates the core principles of the Magna Carta (which incidentally celebrated its 800th birthday in 2015).

What is ‘agile working’ and how is it likely to affect you? Jocelyn Anderson talked to Virginia Clegg, Senior Partner elect of national firm DAC Beachcroft, to find out.

Agile working is beginning to gather momentum. It’s a concept that has been around for a few years, but it has come into sharp focus recently in the legal market because of its adoption by a number of firms, including Herbert Smith, Wedlake Bell, DAC Beachcroft and, after an announcement in August, Clifford Chance. Indications are that this new idea is likely to be taken up increasingly over the next few years, and that it is going to touch the working lives of many Legal Secretaries quite soon.

You become an achiever by achieving your goals. If you achieve your goals, you’re an achiever. If you don’t achieve your goals, you’re not an achiever.

This is a simple, binary way to think about achievement. To achieve means to reach, attain or accomplish. What you choose to reach, attain or accomplish is up to you.

The difference between an achiever and a non-achiever is largely a matter of attention. Non-achievers give their goals little attention, if they bother to set goals at all. Non-achievers reach, attain or accomplish something other than their goals — and quite often that is someone else’s goals, without consciously making those goals their own.

Here is a selection of vacancies from our Legal Secretary Jobs Board this month:

Legal Secretary – Personal Injury

Location:  London

Salary:  £33,500

Closing Date: 11/10/15

Leigh Day is urgently seeking a Legal Secretary, to assist a Partner within our Personal Injury department. The successful applicant will hold a responsible position providing secretarial and litigation support to the Partner.

Disputes in property and conveyancing do not often find their way into the Law Reports, but there are two areas of conveyancing practice — one recent (2015 in the High Court, Chancery Division) and the other not so recent (November 2013, which went to the Court of Appeal) — which apply to common aspects of pre-contract searches and enquiries and which are therefore worth looking at. I’ll deal with the former in this article and the latter next month.

In June a landmark case involving a husband hiding his assets from his wife finally worked its way to the Supreme Court.

Michael Prest is a wealthy oil trader. A High Court judge ruled in 2011 that he was worth at least £37.5 million at the time. His former wife said he may be worth much more, but in any event the judge, Mr Justice Moylan, ordered Michael Prest to pay his former wife £17.5 million. Now although the figures are large, there is nothing otherwise remarkable about the judgement, except that Mr Prest tried to hide behind company law to avoid paying the £17.5 million divorce settlement.