KEY DOCUMENTS :
Form FP301 (Notice of attendance of duly authorised lawyer)
Form FP300 (Request by educational charity for authorisation by the President)
Application to attend hearings on behalf of the TP
Request to The TP to publish blog post arising from a pilot hearing
(A legal blogger came to my hearing questionnaire)
Legal Bloggers Pilot
This page contains information about the legal bloggers pilot set out in Family Procedure Rules Practice Direction 36J, which runs from 1 October 2018 until 30 June 2020.
Under the pilot ‘duly authorised’ lawyers may attend private hearings on a similar basis to journalists. Rules regarding privacy and restrictions on reporting remain unchanged.
We explain a little about the scheme and how it came about here.
STOP PRESS : Legal Blogging Pilot Leaflet launched. We’ve made this leaflet to help explain the scheme to those whose cases bloggers want to attend. Bloggers can print and take it with them to court, to hand out as required.
Read our FAQs below.
Who can attend?
Duly authorized lawyers fall into three categories :
- Practising lawyers
- Non practising lawyers working for a Higher Education Institution
- Non practising lawyers working for a registered educational charity whose details have been placed on a list with the President’s office. The Transparency Project is such a charity.
How do I identify a hearing to attend?
Whilst most private hearings can be attended under this scheme, those which are ‘conciliation’ type hearings are not covered by the scheme (though that is not to say that a judge might not agree in an individual case to permit access. Cases marked as FHDRA (First Hearing Dispute Resolution Appointment), IRH (Issues Resolution Hearing), DRA (Dispute Resolution Appointment) or FDR (Financial Dispute Resolution) are ‘conciliation’ type hearings so you are unlikely to be able to attend these hearings under the scheme.
Generally cases with a C number are care (public law children), cases with a P number are private law children, cases with a F number are injunctions (Family Law Act) and D is financial remedy (divorce).
You will need to look at the list to see how long the hearing is listed for and whether it is worth attending (for example you might not want to dip in to day four of seven, but you might identify a one day final hearing that you are able to attend throughout).
Court lists are freely accessible the day before by registering with Courtserve web service.
What will I need?
To be ‘duly authorised’ you will need to attend court with :
- picture identification
- completed FP301 ‘Notice of Attendance of duly authorized lawyer’ form (one for each hearing)
- written confirmation of attendance as a non practising lawyer under cover of an HEI or educational charity
A lawyer who attends under PD36J cannot have any other connection to the case and must confirm that they are attending for journalistic, public legal education or research purposes.
You might find it helpful to take our information leaflet with you to hand out to those involved in the cases you want to observe.
How will the scheme be evaluated?
We have devised a short questionnaire on Survey Monkey (link to the left). We are requesting that any lawyer who attends court under PD36J should complete this survey for each hearing attended – even if the lawyer was refused entry or did not ultimately write any blog post or article as a result of the attendance. This will enable us to build up a picture of what works and what doesn’t work, how much the scheme is being used, what unexpected issues are cropping up, and any regional variation. We have applied for funding to support this work and hope to publish a full evaluation in due course. There is no obligation on you to complete this form, but the more people who complete it the more accurate the picture will be of how the scheme is or is not working. We are also preparing a survey for those involved in a hearing attended by a legal blogger to tell us their experiences (lawyer, parent, judge etc). The link will appear to the left when it is ready.
Please send us links to your blog posts under this scheme as we will be disseminating them as widely as possible as well as gathering as many links in one place as possible. We are happy to host guest posts for lawyers who do not have their own blog, subject to editorial and legal checks. See ‘Will you publish my blog’ below.
Will you publish my blog?
Keep in touch with how the pilot is going
You can read blog posts written under the pilot here.
Do you do 'requests'?
- Whilst it is helpful to be pointed in the direction of hearings that might be interesting and worthwhile for us to attend, we have a limited number of legal bloggers on our team, who often have professional commitments during the day. We have no funds to pay legal bloggers for their travel or time and they generally blog on a voluntary (unpaid) basis. It is therefore unlikely that we would have the capacity to attend a specific hearing on request, particularly at short notice.
- We are an educational charity not a campaigning group. If we attended the hearing we might take a different view of your case than you do, and we might want to speak to various people involved with different views than your own. We generally try to report on a neutral basis without taking up a position for or against one or other ‘side’. We are independent of any party or the court.
- We might not be able to report anything at all about your case even if we came to court.
- We would have to think about whether there was a risk that one party might want us to attend in order to cause difficulty for or intimidate the other party.
Please don’t send us lots of detail about your case in the hope we will attend court. We probably couldn’t report it even if we did attend, and we don’t want you to be criticised for sharing information that you shouldn’t have. We will update this page as and when we are able to develop a more sophisticated policy on these issues.
Please do send us :
- the case number, time, date, location, length and type of hearing
- no more than a paragraph outlining what the case is about and why you think we should come
- contact details of the other parties so that we can check if they object to our attendance before coming
Can I object to a legal blogger (or journalist) coming into my hearing?
Legal Blogging Pilot Posts
The transparency of family court appeals: the new Practice Direction 30B
In family proceedings, some appeals go to the Court of Appeal, some (mostly) to a High Court judge in the Family Division of the High Court or the Family Court. Routinely Court of Appeal appeals are heard in open court and the parties, other than children, are named...
TP wins pro bono innovation of the year award
We are rather chuffed to say that the day before yesterday we unexpectedly won an award. Wednesday night was the Bar Pro Bono awards ceremony, and we were in the running for the pro bono innovation award, as a result of our work getting legal blogging established in...
‘Are you here because of the significant failure?’
As it happens I wasn't, and the lawyer who asked me this had assumed wrongly. I was attending court just to see what was on that day, and to use the legal blogging pilot to try to report a typical day in the life of a circuit judge. But I'd stumbled upon a case where,...
Ordinary heartbreak
This post is about a hearing I attended recently as a legal blogger. I wrote about the overall experience that day here. This hearing was a case management hearing in a care case. Although such cases are private and I would not normally be permitted to write publicly...
The four corners of legal blogging
Recently I found myself with a day free of hearings or pressing work, and decided to spend it legal blogging. The night before the hearing I took a look at the court lists, and identified one with several shortish hearings that (based on the case number and...
President’s guidance as to reporting on family courts
Recently I found myself with a day free of hearings or pressing work, and decided to spend it legal blogging. The night before the hearing I took a look at the court lists, and identified one with several shortish hearings that (based on the case number and...
The mystery of the missing Minutes (or… minutes turn into hours and into months…)
As part of the decision made by the President of the Family Division in the appeal by TP member, Louise Tickle in February, Sir Andrew McFarlane stated that guidance to courts would need to be issued to address the uncertainty that existed if a journalist or legal...
Tafida Raqeeb Judgment Summary: Continuation of Life-Sustaining Treatment in Italy held to be in Child’s Best Interests
Being slightly geeky, we like to follow the minutes of meetings of the Family Procedure Rule Committee, particularly since our request to the committee to consider implementing a legal blogging pilot, the progress of which we were able to track through consecutive (if...
Olly Sheridan: A Brief Update
This is a guest post from Transparency Project member, Emma Nottingham and Peta Coulson-Smith (Paediatric Registrar, and Clinical Training Fellow & Senior Teaching Fellow in Clinical Ethics and Law at the University of Southampton). Peta tweets as @drpetacs. This...
Tafida Raqeeb Case: Day 5 (final day) of the High Court hearing
A further hearing in respect of Olly Sheridan has taken place in the High Court with judgment handed down today. Both parents were represented by experienced lawyers throughout the 10 day hearing, also attended by accredited media representatives and legal bloggers....