Ten things I wish I’d known before I started in family law
Nobody sat me down before my first contested hearing and told me what it would actually be like.
I don’t mean the law. The law you can learn. I mean the texture of it. The listing system. The clients who call on Sunday evenings. The particular feeling of sitting with someone in real crisis and having to give them advice they don’t want to hear. The fact that winning in the Family Court looks nothing like the version described at law school.
What follows are ten things I wish someone had told me at the start. Not the textbook version. The actual version.
1. Nobody plans it.
Ask a room of family lawyers how they ended up here. You won’t get a single consistent answer. A few came for the advocacy. Some were drawn by something in their own experience. Others took a training contract seat expecting to be bored and discovered they weren’t. Many simply applied, got the job, and found the work suited them in ways they hadn’t anticipated.
The origin story matters less than you think. What matters is what you do once you’re here.
2. The readiness you’re waiting for doesn’t exist.
There is no moment when you will feel ready. Not before the first hearing, not before the first cross-examination, not before the first negotiation that actually matters. What happens instead is that you do the thing, it goes reasonably well or it doesn’t, and gradually you become someone who knows how to do it.
Every senior lawyer you have ever admired is making considered decisions based on experience and judgement while staying outwardly calm. That is it. That is the whole trick.
3. Winning looks different here.
In children cases there are rarely “winners”. There are better outcomes and worse ones. Sometimes the finest result you will achieve all year is a settlement that neither party is happy with but both can live with. A two-parent relationship that survives proceedings, however bruised, is a good outcome for the child caught in the middle of it.
The client who wants the other side to suffer needs an honest conversation early. Their emotional instructions and their legal interests are not always pointing in the same direction. Your job is to serve the latter.
4. Your client is not always right.
People in distress are sometimes mistaken, sometimes unreasonable, and occasionally not telling you everything. None of this makes them bad people. It makes them people. Your job is to advise honestly even when the advice is unwelcome, and to hold your professional judgement even when your client is absolutely certain that the other side is uniquely awful.
Delivering difficult advice is one of the most important skills in the profession and one of the most consistently avoided. Clients can handle being told hard truths. What they cannot handle is discovering at a hearing that what they were told bore no resemblance to the reality they are now sitting in.
5. Manage expectations from the first appointment. Document everything.
Most complaints don’t arise from bad outcomes. They arise from unexpected ones. The client told they will win everything, who then loses something, will blame their lawyer. The client told clearly and early that this will be difficult, and why, will almost always understand.
Have the costs conversation at the first appointment. Write it down. Record what was said, what was advised, and what was agreed. This is not bureaucracy. It is protection for your client and for you.
6. Pensions. Always pensions.
Clients look at the house. They forget the pension. In financial remedy proceedings, defined benefit pensions are consistently the most undervalued and under-discussed asset on the table. The cash equivalent transfer value does not always reflect what the pension is actually worth, particularly in final salary schemes. Actuarial input is often necessary rather than optional.
A client who reaches a final order without a proper understanding of the pension position has not been properly advised. That conversation, the one nobody wants to have because it involves a spreadsheet and a lot of explaining, is part of the job.
7. The FDR is where cases settle. Treat it accordingly.
The Financial Dispute Resolution hearing is the most important hearing in financial remedy proceedings and the point at which most cases resolve. A judge, not the trial judge, gives an honest non-binding view of where the case likely ends up. If both sides have been properly advised and prepared, this is a genuinely useful moment.
The mistake is treating it as a staging post rather than the main event. Know your range. Know what your client can move. Have the difficult conversation before you walk in, not in the break when things have already started going sideways.
8. The first hearing is never just the first hearing.
Interim arrangements have a habit of becoming permanent ones. An order made for six weeks while a welfare report is prepared tends to persist. Courts are reluctant to unsettle arrangements that appear to be working, whatever the original intention. The position you secure at the first hearing frequently shapes everything that follows.
Treat it with the seriousness it deserves, even when it is dressed up as procedural.
9. Domestic abuse is in more cases than it appears, and coercive control is the hardest to spot.
Domestic abuse is present in a significant proportion of family law cases. It may not appear in any formal record. Coercive control is often less visible than physical violence, and can be considerably more damaging over time. Understanding why victims don’t always leave, why they minimise, why the history of what happened may be entirely invisible to outside agencies – this is not supplementary knowledge. It is core to doing this work properly.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 changed how abuse must be handled in family proceedings. Practice Direction 12J has specific requirements. Know both before you encounter a case that engages them, because that case will arrive sooner than you expect.
10. Look after yourself properly, not as an afterthought.
Family law is emotionally demanding in ways that accumulate. The accounts of abuse and loss and crisis that you will hear regularly take a toll. This is documented. It is also routinely ignored by the lawyers experiencing it, because the culture of the profession has historically treated endurance as a virtue and difficulty as something to push through rather than address.
It is not a virtue. A lawyer running on empty is not giving their best to anyone. They are also at greater risk of the kind of mistake that the SRA eventually takes an interest in.
The attrition from family law is real. The clients of the future need lawyers who are still there to help them. Managing the work sustainably, real boundaries, proper support, a genuine life outside the files, is not a soft concern. It is the condition of doing this for a career rather than a few exhausting years.
I wrote a book on all this because an evening at Kingston University Law School left me with questions I realised nobody had properly answered. This article is the short version. The book is the longer one. Without Prejudice: Save As To Sanity — Bundles & Breakdowns: A Future Family Lawyer’s Guide to Chaos is available on Amazon.
Zubair Dharamsi, Partner, Rose & Rose