Parents joined to a child’s family law dispute (for no reason?**)

Anecdotally, there appears to be an increasing number of situations where the parents of a spouse are forcibly required to provide disclosure of their personal arrangements as part of their child’s property settlement proceedings.

Arguably, the highest profile case in this regard was MacDowell and Williams [2012] FamCA 479.

In this case, the parents of a woman going through a property settlement allegedly had access to wealth in excess of $20 million.

Following a marriage of around 7 years, the husband as part of the matrimonial litigation tried to get access to the wills of his former in-laws and the deed for a trust, which he believed his wife was a primary beneficiary of.

Acknowledging that each situation would depend largely on the facts, the court in this case decided:

1. While the husband could get a copy of the trust deed, the court flagged it was unlikely that the trust would be taken into account in any form under the property settlement (i.e. it would be treated neither as an asset or a financial resource), given that the wife was only one of many potential beneficiaries and had received less than $30,000 of distributions from the trust during the entire marriage;
2. The wills did not need to be disclosed on the basis that the parents had full testamentary capacity and may change their wills, or indeed, may otherwise spend or dispose of a substantial part of their wealth; and
3. The privacy of the parents’ personal affairs was seen as an important factor in denying access to the wills and estate planning documents.

Interestingly, the court did however note that if the wife’s parents had lost capacity or they were in extremely poor health, then it may have created a situation where the wills would be required to be disclosed.

As usual, please contact me if you would like access to any of the content mentioned in this post.

** For the trainspotters, the title of today's post is riffed from the Church song 'It’s no reason'.

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The Privacy Act and View Legal’s international footprint

A key component of the View Legal platform has been its dedication to early adoption of innovations that can help achieve the reason we built the platform – to create the kind of firm our friends would choose to use.

The 2014 changes to the privacy rules requiring more detailed disclosure of businesses' international footprint is a timely opportunity for us to revisit the extent of the contribution made to the View Legal platform from around the world.

Like most businesses, our success essentially depends on a network of specialists. As a law firm, we have an agreement with each service provider that receives personal client information which requires that they comply with the Australian privacy legislation.

A summary of our virtual team currently (although it sometimes changes on a weekly basis) is as follows:

1. we have lawyers based in the Philippines, regional Queensland, India, South Africa and suburban Brisbane.


2. our IT team has contributors in the Brisbane CBD, various locations throughout India and suburban Brisbane, together with cloud supported services throughout the USA and other confidential locations.


3. our marketing and collateral providers are sourced from various locations throughout Europe, USA, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines and Australia.


4. one of our favourite social media consultants currently assists from suburban Brisbane, other than when she is travelling in locations such as Buenos Aires, Spain, Italy, Greece, the UK, France and Germany.


5. one of our research consultants currently works out of Argentina.


6. we have copy editors based in New South Wales, Victoria, the US and the UK.


7. we have administrative and accounting support from assistants in the Philippines, New Zealand, Canada, Pakistan and Sweden.


8. our primary word processing provider, who has been a critical part of our success, even in the years prior to View Legal launching, is based in India.

As the popularity of platforms such as Elance and Fiverr (that we have used extensively from their launch) continues to grow, we suspect the only certainty for our business is that our international footprint will also continue to grow.

This said, the growth of our international team has been matched by the growth of our Australian based team, and we take great pride in the fact that all staff enjoy flexibility around their work arrangements, and work remotely with access to physical office space on a needs basis only.

Until next week.

Image credit: Alan Cleaver cc