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→What else needs to be done?
The practice of family law in British Columbia is, from a lawyer's point of view, very different today than it was just twenty years ago. As a young lawyer just starting out, I remember treating every new case that came in the door as if it was going to be resolved at trial. That was just the assumption we made then. We didn't think about mediation or arbitration, and collaborative negotiation had yet to be introduced in the province. Parenting coordination hadn't been established, and unbundled legal services were just starting to be discussed.
Very few lawyers make the same assumption today. Most of us assess new cases for certain factors that might make litigation inevitable — including the presence of family violence, the need for orders protecting people or orders protecting property, and applications to move away with children — and our first inclination is often to pick up the phone and call the lawyer on the other side to talk about what's going on between our clientsrather than filing a claim in court. We have more tools to settle cases these days than ever before, and the fact that less than 5% of family law court cases are resolved by trial seems to reflect the growth of these options.
The bigger problems — the cost of legal services, the complexity of the legislation and case law, the difficulty and adversarial nature of court processes, the chronic delays affecting the court system, and our failure to properly fund alternatives to court — have barely been touched, and I'm not sure that any government is really prepared to tackle these problems head-on.