[Solved] Access Issues

Hi if your case is straight forward and you won’t be accused of being abusive , a bad parent and so on I’d self rep . If you will be , rightly or wrongly , I wouldn’t bother with s solcitor as for not much more money you can get a barrister to be at the hearing and will do some of the work leading up to that . Don’t waste money on solicitors letters to your ex . They carry no more weight than you asking to see your kids . Keep a diary of current contact , keep texts or emails from your ex that prooves it’s all just a power trip . Anything you think a court will find useful . As angry as she may make you don’t flare up or give her any excuse to accuse you of being unreasonable or anything like that . I have enough texts that prove my denial of contact is about money . So you need evidence of your situation rather than one word against another

What I did was see a solicitor for an hour and get an idea of the process etc and the order of things . I was going to self rep but it became clear this was aboht my ex stopping me from being in my kids’ lives so I will use a barrister . Buy that guide . Best £16 you’ll spend . I have no affiliation to that site but I found it really handy .

Hi rilewis,

yes i think you need to take the legal route. before i took it, i was seeing kids every saturday 11-8pm by mutual agreement. that was only after the access times kept changing on weekly basis. when it got to 3pm-8pm, i had enough and took legal route. citydad got a bargain, £400 for barrister. i was paying £900 per hearing inc vat. he did all the drafting of position statements/witness and draf/final orders which was good.

before i took legal route, i thought its nice to see kids every saturday, as opposed to every other weekend. but what happens when you want to take them on big days out, lego land, seaside etc? you need more time, and you deserve more time with your kids. so i went to court and got every other weekend, plus mid-week hours every other weekend. i wanted midweek overnights every week, but ex being too stubborn about it and using kids ages as excuse e.g disruption to routine. that will be a fight for another time.

Yeah £400+vat I was surprised . If only I knew all this when doing the divorce !
What I did was find someone that was quite newly qualified , I think 3 years but I expect perfectly good enough to deal with my case .. obv the more qualified the more you’ll pay . If your stuff is straight forward I guess you don’t need the best in the biz .. you need to nip these things in the bud from the off . You’ll find contact can just get more and more difficult as time passes , and then they meet a new partner and set up shop and want to spend more time with your kids etc and you find your days get moved about more and more to suit them . If you’re on good enough terms to get the schedule agreed amongst yourselves ,a consent order , do that and get a solcitor to write it up and then you can send that off to court yourself . Don’t pay them for the privileged ! Never know might catch the ex on a good day and save all the time and hassle

thanks guys for all the comments.

I think i will try to do this myself until i get a hearing and then look into a barrister for that. My ex is a complete narcissist and will no doubt make up all the things she can to make my life difficult. If she does start making up lies & saying i'm not fit to bring up my daughter then surely any judge would see through that given the fact that she hands my girl over to me every friday night. If i was that guy why would she let her stay with me at all.

I will buy that book and see how far i can get on my own. Thanks again all.