Top tips for appraisals Do you dread appraisal time? Tend to find them a demoralising experience? Or are you often the one conducting the appraisals? Find it hard to know how to deliver them well? Read on here for our three top tips on how to be a good appraiser…and...

I’m having a ‘miracle pregnancy’. But this is why I’d never tell people to believe in miracles. Many, many individuals and couples go through fertility problems. It’s a situation that is at the same time both incredibly common and incredibly isolating. Suddenly, everyone around you is pregnant. I’m not even...

Family lawyers? Or Family Solutions Advisors? When is a family lawyer not a lawyer? When they’re a coach, counsellor, emotional support, psychologist and spend their lives trying to find magic solutions to intractable and complicated emotional and familial issues…. Alongside the advent of no-fault divorce, there has been a fair...

Last month was an exciting one for family lawyers as the long-awaited introduction of no-fault divorce became law.  There’s no doubt this is a big step forward for a system that was bizarrely antiquated in insisting that people still provided reasons for why they should be given a divorce. It...

What is love? (“baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more”) Thank you to Haddaway for making it impossible to say those words without segueing into that 90s pop classic. Valentine’s Day is coming up next week. It’s a day associated with hearts, flowers and grand romantic gestures.  But...

  With all our talk about wellbeing in the legal profession, what’s the glaring gap? What are we not talking about? Well, who do we mean when we talk about the ‘legal profession’? Is it just lawyers or do we include secretaries, PA’s, IT staff, front of house and reception,...

We’re all worrying about something, aren’t we? There’s always something that’s outside of our control. It’s a big old world out there and there’s a lot that falls into the category of ‘The Great Unknown’. The pandemic and other recent events have cracked open the idea of the world we...

It’s Good Divorce Week in the UK and the focus has been on the (worryingly high) numbers of separated couples who say they were not offered advice by their lawyer about how to put their children first. But what about those lawyers who do tell their clients to put their...

Why therapeutic supervision for lawyers is the next big thing (And why it’s not quite the same as therapy) By Tim Rice For nearly two years I’ve been working with lawyers providing therapeutic supervision. Essentially this means I meet them individually every month or even every two or three monthsfor...

The recent and very public separation of Alice Evans and Ioan Gruffudd is a story that, in some ways is as old as time. Man leaves wife and starts relationship with younger woman. Wife vents her anger to all and sundry in a highly public way. Bitter divorce ensues. It’s...

It’s a paradox, isn’t it, that most highly-educated, accomplished people working in professional services such as law and finance struggle with confidence? It’s one of the top issues that people come to therapy and coaching to talk about. Well-meaning supervisors often try to help by urging their juniors to “have...

Self-care has become part of our everyday lingo in recent years. And it’s no bad thing that we’ve all become more au fait with the need to look after ourselves mentally. But what do you do when your need to look after yourself comes into conflict with the needs and...

We’re obsessed with imposter syndrome, aren’t we? There’s always someone going on about it. President Biden even got in on the act recently, saying he feels ‘self-conscious’ and that it’s surreal to realise he is President. We’re living in an age when it’s no longer taboo to show such vulnerabilities....

Well, what a weird thing to say… I mean, who doesn’t believe in wellbeing? Particularly at the moment, with reports of staff in professional services industries suffering due to overwork in lockdown. I get it. And I do believe in looking after ourselves. But increasingly I’ve come to believe that...

A couple came to see me a year or so ago. They appeared in different Zoom windows because they were in separate houses. A few weeks earlier she had moved out. Communication between them had broken down. They hadn’t been arguing but had not been “connecting” in the way she...

Last month I had some bad news. I heard first thing in the morning. I had a big cry. I considered crawling under my duvet. Then I slapped some make up on my face and got on with my (busy) work day.  If this sounds a bit cold hearted or...

Contrary to popular belief, most lawyers spend their lives attempting to dissuade rather than persuade their clients to go to court.  Those on the ‘inside’ of the profession know only too well the flaws of the system and the reasons why court is often best avoided. 

The legal world was rocked last week (OK, slight exaggeration) by what is now known as ‘Vardie cardie gate’ (or ‘Vardigan gate’, to use its formal name). An email written by well-known family law firm owner Ayesha Vardag was leaked to the press, in which she berated staff for wearing...

Watch Annmarie’s 3 steps to take when you’re feeling anxious.

Me and ‘him indoors’ celebrated our wedding anniversary last week. This gave me a chance to share photos on social media of our wedding day; me looking pretty, him looking young; both of us looking considerably less knackered than we do now. 

Here are 3 top tips when going through a relationship breakdown (or supporting someone who is).

Watch one very easy (and slightly naughty) was of getting rid of anger.

Watch how to beat perfectionism in one simple step.

It’s a curious job, being a family lawyer. Yes, you need to be a technical expert, meticulous drafter, font of legal knowledge, tenacious advocate. But the demands of the job go way beyond the legal. You’re also required to act as therapist, life coach, parent and best friend all rolled...

For couples everywhere, spending so much more time together during lockdown is a gift as well as a challenge. Forced proximity = new opportunities. We’ve all found different ways to be together in this Covid-19, safety-first time. However, in the hope that this might help, I’ve drawn together some ideas...

Annmarie: Well, Jo, things have got pretty weird since our last blog haven’t they? Over a month into lockdown now due to Covid 19 and I think we’re all feeling a constant low-level anxiety. How can we cope? There’ve been reports of some people drinking more alcohol in lockdown (reports...

Since Covid 19 hit our shores, most of us have existed in a state of shock, not quite believing that this is our new reality. Now we’re becoming strangely accustomed to the horrors in the news and the weirdness of the situation. And all the while we’re trying to make...

It’s bloody horrible at the moment isn’t it? Over the course of a week or so we’ve gone from a relatively normal existence (albeit with worries about developments in other countries) to total lockdown. And even though we had an inkling that this was coming, the reality has sent many...

Addictions are often pretty obvious. They manifest in public, humiliating ways. There’s the classic idea of the alcoholic, the Phil Mitchell from Eastenders type, stumbling around, incoherent, hurling abuse or slumped in a corner. Or the drug addict, ill-looking, emaciated and shifty a la Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting.

Annmarie: Jo, we wanted to have a chat about the festive season and dealing with work Christmas parties when you’re sober or trying to cut down or stop. I think for many people this time of year is a tricky one. What’s it like for you as a sober lawyer?

Jo: Annmarie, we recently discovered that we are both ‘sober’ lawyers. I’ve been sober for more than 11 years and you for more than 13 years*. We have also set up our own businesses. Do you think that’s a coincidence?

It’s the right time of year to be talking about ghosts. The ones I’m talking about here aren’t those that come out on Halloween though. But they can still be pretty spooky. I’m talking about people from the past re-surfacing in our lives, either by design or by chance. How...

Having procrastinated over the title of this article for a fair amount of time I can tell you that life in the brain of a lawyer ain’t an easy one. It’s teeming with all sorts of stuff: a ton of perfectionism, a heap of compulsive overthinking and a pretty hefty...

“HAIR IS EVERYTHING” We all secretly knew this to be true but it took Fleabag for us to know we knew it. Clearly it’s not the only lesson to take from that programme (the main one being that, if that’s what priests look like these days, we need to start...

So I’ve made it to the first anniversary of starting my own business and I’m chuffed as hell about it.

“How can I learn to become more resilient?” Clients often ask this in their first therapy session. They tell me that they find it hard to cope with setbacks and they set ‘achieving’ resilience as their ‘goal’ for therapy. It’s one of those buzz words like mindfulness that has been...

Every so often you get those times when a certain phrase plays over and over in your head. For me at the moment it’s about comparing my ‘insides’ to other’s ‘outsides’.

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing Jeanette Winterson speak on the subject of feminism and the #metoo movement. This became a broader discussion about the fact that we seem to be living in a more split and divided world than ever before with, as Winterson put it, opposing...

I had an extraordinary experience at a conference last week, witnessing a presentation that was moving, desperately sad and hopeful in equal measure. The speakers were Jo Berry and Patrick Magee. Jo’s father, Sir Anthony Berry was a Conservative MP who was killed in the Brighton bombing in 1984. Jo’s...

Mindfulness is the buzz-word of recent years with everyone desperately trying to remain ‘in the present moment’. But how does that fit with the ticking clocks on the computer screen that dominate many lawyers’ lives? They’re an ever-present reminder of how long you’ve been working on each job and of...