Farrar Gesini & Dunn
Canberra's First Family Lawyers
Family Law is a maze, talk to the specialists
Consensus Family Lawyers: a new way to resolve family law disputes
Farrar Gesini & Dunn are setting up a new legal practice called Consensus Family Lawyers to send a clear message to the Canberra community and beyond that there is a firm of family lawyers who are dedicated to resolving their clients’ problems without going to Court.
We have brought a team of people together at Consensus Family Lawyers who will use collaboration, mediation, facilitation or arbitration as the primary way to reach an outcome.
The establishment of Consensus is in response to our perception that there are at least two legitimate ways to resolve disputes which arise as a result of a couple separating and that conventional lawyers only address one of those ways.
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Living with Responsibility
Concepts in the law regarding children – article by Adam Bak, solicitor at Farrar Gesini & Dunn
In 2006, the Federal Government changed the Family Law Act to introduce a change in the way children’s cases were determined. The changes move away from traditional concepts of “custody” and “access” towards a more modern and co-operative system of “live with”, “spend time with”, “communicate with”, and importantly, “parental responsibility”. The new law has been argued in the Full Court of the Family Court many times and a clearer understanding of what the various terms mean has now been established.
The underlying principle of the parenting provisions in the Act remains that the Court must do what is in the best interests of the child. There are a number of factors the Court must take into account, most notably, the benefit to the child of having a meaningful relationship with both parents, and the need to protect the child from harm, abuse, neglect and violence.
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Separating De Facto Couples
Chris Crowley is a senior consultant with Canberra Family Law firm, Farrar, Gesini & Dunn. Chris says the current mish-mash of laws means that bickering couples who live in border regions will often argue over which law applies. Another problem with the current schemes is that superannuation is not included.
Chris Crowley: There was a pivotal case in the ACT in 1998 where one party was about close to 60, who was finishing her working life, had very little if any, superannuation. The other partner to the relationship, he had just acquired a PhD. He had a very significant income capacity and he had significant accumulated benefits under a generous Commonwealth superannuation scheme. Now the court in that particular case couldn’t make any order giving to her a proportion or a percentage of his superannuation. What they had to do was to take it into account in a general sense, and everybody knows that that really doesn’t do adequate justice in those types of situations.