Month: May 2021

25.05.21

The online divorce portal – bringing family law into the 21st Century

As with so many aspects of our lives, Covid-19 restrictions have forced family law online in the last year. Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service have had an online portal for processing divorces in the works for years, but until relatively recently it has only been available to a select group as part of a…

Claimant’s search for vindication backfires with finding he committed a serious sexual assault and could be described as a rapist

In Coker v Nwkanma [2021] EWHC 1011 (QB), the Claimant sued his former friend over an allegation that he had sexually assaulted a woman – anonymised in the proceedings as ‘X’ – at the Defendant’s home. Both parties were litigants-in-person, and, by the time the proceedings came to trial before Saini J, there remained ambiguities…

17.05.21

Beware of the discontinuance; sleeping dogs can bite

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)’s guidance about when it is appropriate to reinstate discontinued criminal proceedings should be ringing alarm bells about how, and why, the charges were dropped in the first place. In Spring 2021, the CPS published new Guidance on “Reconsidering A Prosecution Decision”. It is a helpful document which all defence practitioners…