Tulsa Family Lawyer and Mediator
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Author: Penniless Parenting
Nowadays, everyone is feeling the pinch. We live in an expensive time, after all, and whether we like it or not, things aren’t going to get any cheaper. In fact, they’ll almost
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Author: Penniless Parenting
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When a couple decides to separate, one of the most important decisions to make is how much time each parent spends with the children. So, we asked Kaleel Anwar, Senior Solicitor from our Manchester office to join us to look at how you can balance your working life with shared parenting.
“The term ‘custody’ is now redundant in law, despite it still appearing in the media, and instead more flexible, shared parenting solutions are preferred.
But there is still a lot of misconception about this area and I work with many clients who have made assumptions that their job, business or even gender will hinder their ability to co-parent.
Courts favour the mother
I frequently hear from clients that the law is “in favour of the mother”. This is simply not true.
There is absolutely no discrimination on the basis of gender by the Courts when determining whether a mother or father would be better suited to caring for their children either during the school week or spending quality time with them during the weekends.
Your business vs your children
I have worked on a number of cases where my clients are of the view that being a business owner, which demands long working hours, is going to act to their detriment if they find themselves in the hands of the Court.
The reality is this is far from the truth. You do not need to choose between running a business or spending time with your children. In fact, the law is tailored to ensure parents can effectively co-parent and share care.
Working hours
Working hours will dictate which times and days work best for a parent to be responsible for their care. Today, most employers will take childcare into account and arrangements can be made to ensure parents can work the hours needed to fit their circumstances.
Owning your own business can increase your flexibility when deciding working hours, which in turn means that you are far more able to share the care of the children
Shared parenting
Shared parenting means that children have two homes where they can feel secure and continue to have a real family life with both parents.
As parents, you are in the best position to decide as to when your children spend time with both of you. Hopefully, a shared parenting schedule can be agreed on by negotiations between your solicitors or using meditation. However, if it cannot be resolved then court intervention may be necessary.
The Court can grant a shared care order allowing children to live and spend time with both parents. Useful to note here that a shared care order does not always mean that the time spent with each parent will be equal.
There has been a significant increase in the number of shared care orders granted by the courts over the past few years given the overwhelming evidence that having a healthy relationship with both parents is in the best interest for the children.
Support network
Many working parents utilise the help of their friends and family to ensure that they can balance their work requirements with time with their children, for example someone helping by collecting your children from school until you have finished a meeting. This support is invaluable and helps you to avoid becoming a “weekend parent”.
Every child, family and case are unique so it is always advisable to obtain specialist advice in relation to your situation and your legal rights.”
For more advice on parenting options available following a divorce or separation please contact our Client Care Team at the number below or by email here.
The post Get the balance right with shared parenting appeared first on Stowe Family Law.
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Author: Kaleel Anwar
Another short working week has mercifully kept the family law news to a minimum, but I’ve found the following four stories for your delectation:
Firstly, it has been reported in the mainstream media that a millionaire banker is suing his ex-wife for £500,000 in rent, which he claims she should have paid him for occupying the former matrimonial home. Kerim Derhalli and Jayne Richardson-Derhalli were divorced in 2016. They agreed a financial settlement, under which Mrs Derhalli received around £6.5 million from Mr Derhalli, and was due another £5 million after completion of the sale of the home, which was owned by Mr Derhalli. Mrs Derhalli remained in occupation of the property, rent-free. However, the sale was delayed, and in March 2017 Mr Derhalli’s lawyers requested that Mrs Derhalli either vacate the property, or start paying rent for her occupation. She refused, and remained in the property until it was sold earlier this year. Mr Derhalli sued Mrs Derhalli for unpaid rent, claiming £20,000 a month for the two years she remained in the property after being asked to leave. At an initial hearing the judge said: “It is my view that Mr Derhalli was entitled to determine the licence to occupy with reasonable notice. It follows that Mrs Richardson-Derhalli could be considered a trespasser from April, 21, 2017, since when she remains liable to pay for the use and occupation of the property.” The case will return to court at a later date, for an assessment to determine the amount of rent Mrs Derhalli should pay. An interesting case – hopefully, a full report of the judgment will be published in due course.
Secondly, Fiona Bruce, Conservative MP for Congleton (no, not the TV presenter), has spoken out against the government’s plans to introduce no-fault divorce. Ms Bruce, who is a solicitor, says that she believes that the new law risks “an immediate spike in divorce rates, which will impact negatively on the families involved.” She told the Law Society Gazette that the government ignored warnings that the changes will make divorce easier, and said: “The removal of fault sends out the signal that marriage can be unilaterally exited on notice by one party with little, if any, available recourse for the party who has been left. There will be far less pressure, or incentive, to work at the relationship in such circumstances.” With respect to Ms Bruce, I am sure that most family lawyers would disagree. People don’t choose to divorce simply because the law makes it easier, and in any event for most people the new law will not make divorce any easier, or any quicker. The new law is not about making divorce easier, but about making it less acrimonious.
Thirdly, the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, has released draft guidance, for consultation, on reporting in the Family Courts. The guidance follows a recent case in which a journalist appealed against a reporting restriction order. Whilst the substantive outcome of the case was ultimately agreed between the parties, the President said that it demonstrated that there remained a need for greater clarity and guidance in relation to applications by journalists to vary/lift statutory reporting restrictions, and the purpose of the Practice Guidance is to meet that need. The President said he welcomes people’s views and suggestions to the consultation, which will close on the 30th of June. You can find the draft guidance here. Whether it will boost news coverage of the family courts, as I understand is the plan, I have my doubts.
And finally, HM Courts and Tribunals Service (‘HMCTS’) and the Ministry of Justice have announced that video hearings are being tested in domestic abuse cases. The study by HMCTS at Manchester Civil Justice Centre means vulnerable people can appear before the court using a video link from a computer in their solicitor’s office, avoiding the distress of appearing in court at an already difficult time. This has been used in six cases so far and feedback from those involved has apparently been positive. Testing will continue in the family and civil courts during the coming months and is being independently evaluated. Justice Minister, Lucy Frazer, said: “We are hearing that, even in the early stages, testing fully video hearings are having a positive effect and ensuring the justice system is supporting people at one of the most difficult times in their lives. I look forward to seeing the evaluation of this work and ensuring we continue to improve access to our courts through new innovations.” An interesting development.
Have a good weekend.
The post A week in family law: No-fault divorce, court reporting, and video hearings appeared first on Stowe Family Law.
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Author: John Bolch
While out for a walk in my neighborhood, I caught a whiff of something that instantly made me think of my grandmother’s house. I haven’t experienced that smell—either from its original source or elsewhere—in maybe 25 years, but the memory of being back at my grandmother’s house was immediate and striking. On the other hand, I can’t really remember or recreate that smell in my mind; either it’s there or it isn’t. I have convenient analog and digital methods of recording images and sounds so that I can see and hear them later, but no way to capture the scent of a dish at a restaurant, a favorite vacation spot, or any other smell that moves me in some way.
I don’t normally think of smelling as being something within the province of machines. I understand, of course, that devices like smoke detectors and breathalyzers perform what amounts to mechanical olfaction of sorts, but I was still sort of surprised to learn that increasingly sophisticated artificial noses are being incorporated into robots and other devices. What intrigues me more than anything is how such sensors might work. How does one go about measuring and quantifying something as broad and seemingly subjective as smell?
All smells result from molecules of various chemicals floating through the air. Not all substances have a smell—only those containing chemicals that are volatile (meaning they evaporate easily). Our nasal cavities contain millions of neural receptors, of about 350 different types—all of which respond to different chemicals. Depending on which chemicals are present and in what quantities, different sets of odorant receptor neurons are activated; the brain decodes each pattern and assigns a meaning to it: “floral,” “putrid,” “Grandma’s house,” or whatever. Therefore, getting a machine to do the same thing involves two challenges: detecting individual chemical components, and figuring out what a specific combination of components in a given proportion represents.
One way to detect chemicals in the air is to use large, expensive laboratory machines such as gas chromatographs and time-of-flight mass spectrometers. These devices can very accurately detect minuscule amounts of volatile chemicals in air samples—but they also detect substances that have nothing to do with smell, so determining just which parts of their output are relevant adds more complexity to the problem. They are also, so far at least, not very portable. But other, more direct—and more compact—methods of artificial smell detection have been developed. Here are just a few of many examples:
Decoding output from an array of sensors (of whatever sort) is an interesting challenge, because substances that are very similar chemically sometimes smell much different from each other; conversely, substances that smell nearly the same can be completely different at the molecular level. For this task, researchers often rely on neural networks, software that can be trained to identify patterns and make educated guesses about new combinations based on their similarities to patterns that have already been verified.
So where is all this technology going to be put to use? And what about those robots?
Artificial noses show the most promise in applications where the human nose is insufficiently sensitive or discriminating. For example, sensors could detect when food is spoiled long before a human nose could—an artificial nose may be built into your refrigerator one day. Just as the bacteria that cause spoilage produce distinctive odors, so do some disease-causing bacteria. Devices have been developed that can diagnose numerous illnesses by smelling a patient’s breath.
But it’s one thing to be able to identify an odor in a test tube; it’s another to be able to trace the source of an airborne scent. This is where robots come in: a mobile platform with an artificial nose can continuously sample the air, reorienting itself dynamically to move in the direction where an odor is strongest. This makes robots that can smell ideal for locating gas leaks, explosives, drugs, and other dangerous stuff—since robots can go places where it would be unsafe to send a human or a dog. One rather gruesome use for sniffing robots is locating buried bodies; this is but one of many possible forensic applications. A mechanical bloodhound may be years in the future, but it’s not at all far-fetched.
Many years ago a company called DigiScents made headlines with its iSmell device, a desktop computer peripheral that could synthesize thousands of scents. Their idea was that games could be enhanced with smells (presumably lots of smoke and burnt rubber), email from that special someone could be scented with perfume, and so on. When DigiScents went out of business in 2001 before the iSmell became commercially available, no one was particularly surprised—why do we need to smell computer games, anyway? But I think the real problem was that they only had half of the solution ready: the output but no input. I suspect that if someone created a pocket-sized gadget that could record the scent of a bakery, garden, or any other smell you encounter and play it back accurately on command, it would be a huge success. I, for one, would gladly pay for a machine that could make scents of my childhood.
Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 9, 2004.
Image credit: Genia Brodsky and Noam Sobel (The Weizmann Institute) [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons
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Author: Joe Kissell
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In child abduction cases we have often seen the ‘abducting’ parent raise the ‘grave risk of harm’ defence to an application by the other parent for the summary return of the child to its ‘home’ country. To put that in a little more detail, the abducting parent removes the child from its home country without the other parent’s consent, the other parent makes an application under the Hague Convention on Child Abduction for the summary return of the child, and the abducting parent raises the ‘defence’ under Article 13(b) of the Convention, namely that to order the summary return would result in a grave risk of exposure to physical or psychological harm, or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation.
Obviously, the allegations relied upon to raise the defence can vary tremendously. In the recent case MB v TB one of the allegations relied upon by the mother was slightly unusual: the father’s relentless and oppressive use of the legal system in the ‘home’ country (in the context of his greater means) to obstruct the mother’s care of the child in that jurisdiction. The case suggests that, for most countries at least, it is likely to be difficult to persuade the English court that such an allegation will make out the defence.
The facts of the case were as follows. Both parents are Israeli citizens. They have one child, ‘L’, who was born in London in 2010. She is an Israeli citizen and a British national. The parties’ relationship broke down in 2012, whilst the mother was residing in Israel, and the parents separated. The father returned to reside permanently in Israel shortly after the mother. L therefore resided in Israel with the mother, from 2012.
After the separation the parents engaged in family court proceedings in Israel. An agreement in relation to custody issues, divorce and ancillary financial issues was endorsed by the court in October 2013, which provided for L to have regular contact with the father. Notwithstanding this, the mother alleged that the father had engaged in a campaign to alienate L from her, and between 2013 and 2017 there was extensive litigation between the parties in the Israeli courts. As Mr Justice MacDonald, hearing the case in the High Court, explained:
“…the mother submits that the course of that litigation was dictated by an intention on the part of the father to use the legal system in a relentless and oppressive effort to obstruct her care of L in that jurisdiction.”
I won’t go into the details of the litigation (you can find a summary in paragraph 22 of the judgment), but there were certainly a remarkable number of court applications issued by both parties between 2013 and 2017: twenty-four by the mother and thirty-six by the father. The parents finally agreed (or so it seemed at the time) to cease all litigation, in November 2017.
On the 6th of November 2018 the mother abducted L to this country. She accepted that the abduction was unlawful. The father applied under the Convention for the summary return of L to Israel, and the mother raised her Article 13 ‘defence’, as mentioned above. The defence also alleged that L was being alienated from her by the father and his new wife, such that there was a risk that L would no longer wish to live with the mother.
Mr Justice MacDonald did not find the defence made out. There was no evidence of alienation. As to the oppressive litigation allegation, it was true both that there had been a substantial amount of litigation between the parents, and that the father was in a better financial position than the mother to sustain that litigation. It was also true that there was likely to be further litigation if L was returned to Israel. However, the English court could be confident that the courts in Israel would take the steps necessary to ensure that any further litigation between her parents, however undesirably protracted, would not be allowed to lead to a grave risk of exposure to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place L in an intolerable situation. Further, the litigation to date had not inflicted appreciable emotional harm on L. There was also no evidence, as the mother asserted, that her mental health would be so affected by further litigation as to disable her from caring for L.
Accordingly, Mr Justice MacDonald ordered that L should be summarily returned to Israel. He concluded his judgment with this familiar appeal to the parents:
“What is clear beyond peradventure is that it is well past time for these parents to stop litigating and start cooperating with regard to L’s welfare. Whilst I am satisfied that L has, happily, the resilience to meet the challenges presented by her parents seeming inability at times to discharge their collective responsibility as parents without resorting to squabbling and bickering between themselves in the courts, L should not have to rely on that resilience to protect her from the emotional consequences of her parents’ inability to collaborate in her best interests. Rather, L is entitled to expect both her parents to prioritise her best interests by co-operating in respect of her welfare. Whilst November 2017 appears now to have represented a false dawn in this regard, it is to be hoped that the parents can now, finally, start putting L first.”
Let us hope that they do.
You can read the full judgment here.
The post Risk of oppressive litigation as a defence in a Hague abduction case appeared first on Stowe Family Law.
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Author: John Bolch
When I first learned to drive, I learned on a car with a manual transmission. It never seemed especially difficult because that was what I got used to. In fact, the first time I had to drive an automatic, I remember being very confused. What was I supposed to do with my left foot? Do I not have to shift at all? And if it’s automatic, then what’s with all these different choices on the gearshift lever? I quickly got the idea, of course, but still preferred the increased control and responsiveness I got from making my own decisions about when to shift. It would therefore seem that I should have the same attitude about bicycles, which not only require manual shifting but typically have many more than four or five gears. But manual bicycle transmissions have always given me trouble, and I’ve frequently wished I could have the convenience of an automatic transmission on a multi-speed bike.
For the record, I am not what you’d call an avid cyclist. Indeed, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I don’t even own a bike right now, because I work at home, I walk most places I need to go, and on the occasions when I have to travel beyond walking distance, I nearly always need to be transporting more people and/or goods than a bike could accommodate. Nevertheless, I like the idea of bike ownership very much—good exercise, good for the environment, and so on.
But even when my bike was my sole form of transportation a number of years ago, I never fully grasped the way bicycle gears worked. That is to say, I understood the mechanics, but actually using them was another story—the logic of how one must manipulate those levers to reach the desired balance between torque and speed always seemed a bit like a black art. It was not a simple linear progression of lower to higher as on a car, but a function of the ratio of the front gear size to the rear gear size, both of which are variable. My usual practice was just to fiddle with the controls until pedaling felt about right, then leave them where they were until I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Another problem with shifting gears on bicycles is that the derailleur—the mechanism that moves the chain between gears of different sizes—is by nature imprecise. Although some designs are better than others, over- or undershooting your desired gear is common, and if you’re pedaling too fast or under too heavy a load, the chain can easily slip off the gears entirely, requiring a greasy manual adjustment. Wouldn’t it be nice if bikes could figure out how to change their own gears as painlessly and accurately as cars with automatic transmissions?
Sure enough, automatic bicycle transmissions of various kinds have been in development for nearly 50 years, though they’re still quite rare (and often expensive). Mechanically, the main thing needed for a basic automatic bike transmission is a motor or piston that moves the chain between gears in place of the standard lever-operated cable. This is a relatively straightforward engineering problem, but the slightly trickier thing is working out how and when to tell the gears to shift. That computation requires the use of a tiny, battery-operated computer along with sensors that determine the current gear and the speeds at which wheels, pedals, and sprockets are moving. The computer constantly recalculates the optimal combination of front and rear gears to keep the rider at a consistent pedaling cadence, automatically signaling the gears to shift lower when going uphill or higher when going downhill. Using a controller on the handlebars, riders can, if they want, adjust the gearing to provide a more intense workout or a gentler ride; they can also override the automatic shifting entirely and use it as a power-assisted manual transmission.
The first automatic bicycle transmission was designed by the Browning family, whose main claim to fame had been gun design. For a while, Browning Components, Inc. was an independent company based near Seattle that focused solely on bicycles and bike transmissions. (It is now entirely defunct, as far as I can tell.) Their most interesting innovation was a special gear with a hinged section (somewhat like a pizza slice) that swung in and out to guide the chain from one gear to the next. It kept the chain engaged in sprockets at all times, rather than simply dropping onto the next gear, virtually eliminating the possibility of the chain slipping; it also made it possible to shift smoothly and almost silently regardless of speed or load. You can still find used Browning bikes or transmissions with some effort and luck.
Shimano, the largest manufacturer of bicycle components such as brakes and shifters, also got into the automatic transmission business for a while. One of their designs used a seven-speed, internally geared hub; another used a power-assisted derailleur system, but added an automatic, powered suspension to adjust the comfort of the ride to fit current conditions. But Shimano, too, stopped making their automatic bike transmissions, presumably because they were unable to find enough people willing to pay a premium for them.
But a number of manufacturers are still developing and selling automatic bike transmissions of various kinds. For example, ProShift offers automatic transmissions that can be retrofitted onto racing bikes. SRAM, which makes wireless manual electronic shifting systems for conventional bikes and an automatic transmission for electric bikes, also sells the Automatix, a purely mechanical two-speed transmission built into a hub. And NuVinci offers continuously variable automatic transmissions for electric bikes, as well as manually adjustable, continuously variable transmissions for non-electric bikes, such as Priority Bicycles’ Continuum.
Adding an automatic transmission to a bicycle seems—in the abstract at least—like a wonderful step forward in user interface. It replaces something awkward with something invisible, which is the way good technology should be. But as numerous manufacturers have seen, cycling enthusiasts aren’t warming to the idea very quickly. Some are put off by the extra weight; some feel it’s not worth the money just to avoid having to move a lever; and some just think automatic transmissions are for wimps. Having never used one of these bikes myself, I can’t say whether the performance would be improved enough to make me want to ride my bike more often, but at least I would no longer view gear shifting as the annoyance I do now.
Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on June 26, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on October 5, 2004.
Image credit: Keanu @ no:wp [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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Author: Joe Kissell
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