Family law firm founder on divorce, drama and decency in the legal sector

A LAWYER and businesswoman who has worked on the legal scene in Leeds her entire career has come full circle with her own family law practice.

Lyn Ayrton has had a prestigious history working at Addleshaw Booth & Co, (now just Addleshaw Goddard) after qualifying in 1990. The firm was then located on South Parade and now, her first offices as a new practice, Lake Legal, were launched in the same building.

A born and raised Yorkshirewoman, from Cookridge, Lyn went to University of Liverpool and in 1997 she moved to Bradford-based Gordon Wright & Wright, now known as Gordons. She said she wanted to start her own firm because of the amount of mergers going on in larger firms.

Ms Ayrton explained: “You don’t have the team you picked when you merge companies. It’s alien to force strangers with different interests who were chosen for different reasons to have the same values and ethos, especially when a merger might mean you coming into contact with someone who you have already rejected. Then it gets a bit awkward!”

In 2005 she moved to Watson Burton, then a small North East firm, and took advantage of their smaller brand name to have a safety net while she built up her team.

She launched Lake Legal in September 2009, mid-recession.

On her all-female team she said: “It was an accident rather than intentional to have a team consisting of women. I think it’s counter-productive to concentrate purely on gender, and I myself would want to be judged on my skills as a lawyer and a person before anyone considered gender.”

We got round to discussing her work after the very important topics of Suits and The Good Wife (any lawyers reading – pick at least one so you can shout at the telly over the screenwriter’s’ legal inaccuracies and the ability to get a new court date in less than 24 hours) and the discussion of gender continued.

“Women aren’t the only ones who give up careers for children, it just so happens that the media seems to get hold of high-net-worth men going through high-profile divorces where the wife hasn’t worked and has looked after the children or the home, but that’s not always the reality.

“We’ve already dealt with five cases where the husband was the stay-at-home parent this year. The problems are the same.

“Similarly, the media has allowed the idea of a common law marriage to flourish when this hasn’t existed since the 1750’s.

“So same sex and heterosexual couples get the same rights, but not people who live together, have children and bank accounts together but have decided, for whatever reason, not to marry.”

Lyn is part of Resolution, an organisation which tries to keep separations and divorces constructive and where possible, conciliatory. She is also a trained arbitrator with similar powers to a judge but in private and without the expenses attached to a court appearance.

“The aim in these cases is not to go to court, which might sound a bit strange, and definitely does to my accountant, but I sleep easier at night knowing that I’ve tried everything before court.

“I could retire early and spend my life on a beach if we decided to take every case to court, but I think that’s the wrong way to practice family law. It’s not the ethos of our firm.

“We are given responsibility for people at a crucial and difficult time in their lives. As a lawyer you have to decide whether you have the client or the profit margins at the heart of what you do.

“The court system, like the NHS, is oversubscribed and under-funded” Lyn said. and with around 120,000 divorces a year in the UK, the family law sector will no doubt have its hands full.