Family Asset Protection Law Guide 2025: Foreword

It is a great honour for me to have been asked to write the Foreword for the Second Edition of this splendid work.

When I first started as a family barrister, working in London in the early 1980s, international family law was in its infancy. Today, it is a crucial and vitally important aspect of practice. A guide that assists in understanding the law in other jurisdictions is invaluable in assisting practitioners to grapple with issues that arise regularly, but are, so often, subtly different and almost always involve a different jurisdiction to the last time the problem was encountered.

Just about every such issue that arose in my practice, and during my time as a judge, involved the jurisdictions covered in this work. In relation to Jersey, Guernsey and the Cayman Islands, it was nearly always trust issues that had to be grappled with. Trusts are covered here, both in those and in the other jurisdictions, comprehensively and extremely clearly.

As the years went by, disputes about marital agreements became increasingly common and contentious. Marriage contracts featured in Europe. Pre- and post-marital agreements abounded in the Commonwealth jurisdictions. Would they be enforced? If not, would they, nevertheless, influence outcomes? How should they be drafted to make them watertight in all relevant jurisdictions? Such issues confront family lawyers each week. So often, it involved the jurisdictions featured here, making this work invaluable for the busy practitioner.

As I read the book, I realised that there was much I simply did not know. I wondered how I had managed to get through my forty-two years, both in practice and as a judge, in ignorance of such important matters. I have absolutely no intention of telling the readers of this work where those gaps in my knowledge lay, but access to such a concise and useful work is exactly what the hard-pressed family lawyer needs to be able to advise their clients. It does, of course, go without saying that an expert opinion from the other jurisdictions will, regularly, be a prerequisite before giving definitive advice on such matters, but there is no doubt that this work will point its reader in exactly the right direction.

Finally, I was delighted to see that media access to family courts is now covered in each chapter. This is an aspect of the work that, for entirely understandable reasons, troubles clients enormously. It will be extremely useful to practitioners to have, readily to hand, the information about any potentially competing jurisdiction.

Marcus Dearle and James Sheedy are to be congratulated on putting together such an invaluable work. I commend it without reservation.