What if you advise your client to pursue arbitration, only for them to receive an unfavourable result? Amy Fox weighs up the pros & cons of arbitration in family cases
- Even though the options available to challenge an arbitral award are extremely limited, there are nonetheless many advantages to the arbitration route in family cases.
The recent case B C v BG [2019] EWFC 7, [2019] All ER (D) 142 (Jan) concerned an application by a wife for a judicial decision order that an arbitral award should not be made into a court order. The wife’s application asserted that:
- there were fundamental and material errors in the arbitrator’s application of the law;
- the law was applied unfairly;
- there were various supervening events (including that the level of the maintenance award meant the wife could not obtain a mortgage and that the award did not meet the wife’s and the children’s needs); and
- that the husband had failed to provide proper financial disclosure /had misled the tribunal, and had been ‘cavalier’ with the truth.
The wife’s application was
