Helen Ward (solicitor)
Helen Ward (Lady Ward ) was admitted in 1978 and was a partner at Ward Bowie Penningtons from 1978-1994. She joined Manches as a partner in 1994.
Background
Ward specialises in family law, with emphasis on the financial consequences of the breakdown of relationships with particular expertise in cases involving substantial assets, complexity and an international element. Where it is necessary she also deals with cases involving the resolution of disputes relating to the children.1
Ward is a Recorder, a Deputy District Judge of the Principal Registry of the Family Division of the High Court and a fellow and committee member of the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. She is a Contributor to Rayden & Jackson on divorce and family matters. Ward is also a past treasurer and member of Resolution (formerly the Solicitors Family Law Association)and is a member of the Times panel of legal experts 2. She is married to Lord Justice Ward.
Ward successfully acted for Beverley Charman who secured a High Court award of £48m against her insurance magnet husband, John Charman, in what is believed to be the biggest divorce award in British legal history.The award has been appealed by John Charman and a decision from the Court of Appeal is imminent. .Other former clients include Paloma Picasso, Lord Lloyd-Webber, Ian McEwan, Countess Spencer and David Seaman.
Response to the Court of Appeal Judgment in Charman
Manches LLP - Response to Charman – Court of Appeal Judgment
In a judgment handed down this morning (24th May 2007), the Court of Appeal has dismissed Mr Charman’s appeal against the award of £48m made to his wife, Beverley.
The Court reviewed the law as it stood at the end of May 2006 following the judgment of the House of Lords in the combined cases of Miller and McFarlane, interpreting and refining the guidance provided by the judgments in those cases.
The Court has provided important clarity in a number of areas connected with the distribution of assets on divorce, particularly in three aspects:
· The treatment of trust assets · Guidance on the principles which apply when redistributing wealth between parties, particularly that property should be shared in equal proportions unless there is a good reason to depart from equality · Guidance on the concept of a special contribution which either party can be found to have made to a marriage and how that should be quantified when redistributing assets on divorce
Significantly, the Court has also called for a far reaching review and reform of the law in this area in England and Wales.
Beverley Charman was represented throughout the proceedings by Helen Ward and her team at Manches LLP together with Martin Pointer QC, Christopher Nugee QC and Junior Counsel, James Ewins and Andrew Mold.
Helen Ward of Manches Family Law team said, ‘This is a significant judgment and brings welcome clarity to a number of important aspects of the law relating to the distribution of assets on divorce.’
‘The Solicitors profession will positively embrace the Court’s suggestion for a broad review and reform in this area to create modern law reflecting today’s modern society.’
Background to the Appeal
Mr and Mrs Charman were married in 1976, when they were respectively 23 and 22. They had no assets. At the final hearing of Mrs Charman’s financial claims in February 2006, their wealth amounted to approximately £131m plus approximately £30m held in a trust for their children. Of the £131m, £68m was held in a family trust and £56m was held in Mr Charman’s sole name. The balance of £8m was held in the sole name of Mrs Charman.
In July 2006, Mrs Charman was awarded £48m (to include her own assets) by the Honourable Mr Justice Coleridge, a Judge of the Family division of the High Court. This is believed to be the highest award ever made by a Court in England and Wales following the determination of contested financial proceedings. Mr Charman, who had offered his wife £20m, obtained leave to appeal against this decision and the hearing before the Court of Appeal took place in March 2007.
Highlights from the Court of Appeal Judgment
Today, the President of the Family Division, Sir Mark Potter, delivered a single judgment of the Court. The Court dismissed the husband’s numerous grounds of appeal.
The judgment referred to the following matters.
· Family Trust
The Court upheld Mr Justice Coleridge’s decision that Mrs Charman should receive an award of £48m finding that the family’s trust assets should be treated as part of the matrimonial property available for distribution between the parties and that it was satisfied that Mr Justice Coleridge had considered the appropriate factors and applied the law correctly.
The Court of Appeal decided that in cases such as this, where the husband has chosen to place a significant proportion of his wealth in a trust arrangement for tax purposes, the Court should balance the reality of the situation against respect for principles of trust law. In the circumstances of the present case, the Court held that it would have been “a reproachful emasculation of the court’s duty to be fair if the assets which the husband had built up in the family trust during the marriage had not been attributed to him.”
· General Principles
The Court elaborated further on the principles which apply when redistributing the wealth available between the parties. The sharing principle, which applies to all property owned by the parties, was interpreted to mean that property should be shared in equal proportions unless there was a good reason to depart from equality.
This echoes the ‘yardstick of equal division’ which was introduced by the House of Lords in White in 2001 ushering in a new era of equality for wives whose awards had previously been limited to their ‘reasonable requirements’. The Court of Appeal decided that since the House of Lords decision in Miller it is appropriate to have regard to the principle of equal sharing at a much earlier stage of the case. This recognises the reality present when the parties’ assets exceed their needs, as is most clearly illustrated by ‘big’ or ‘huge money cases’.
In short, Charman enables judges to state openly and at a much earlier stage in their reasoning that the case before them is a 50:50 case and determine the appropriate award accordingly.
· Special Contribution
Mrs Charman had accepted that Mr Charman had accumulated extraordinary wealth in his career in the insurance industry and had therefore made an exceptional contribution which the Court should take into account when redistributing their assets on divorce. Mrs Charman therefore conceded that Mr Charman should retain a greater share of the parties’ assets and only claimed a 45% share.
Mr Charman, however, claimed that his exceptional contribution entitled him to retain almost 85% and Mrs Charman 15% of the assets generated during the marriage leaving Mrs Charman with £20m out of his fortune of £131m.
The Court of Appeal held that while the notion of a special contribution had survived the House of Lords decision in Miller and McFarlane, the difficulty of comparing the parties’ contributions and the danger of discriminating against a homemaker in favour of a breadwinner, limited the doctrine to a small and exceptional number of cases. The Court made it clear that a special contribution need not be financial and can be made by a party whose role has centred exclusively on maintaining the home and raising children, although it declined to provide examples of such contributions. Where a special contribution of a financial nature is claimed, it will usually be necessary to show “an exceptional and individual quality… whether by genius in business or in some other field” in addition to the generation of significant wealth.
The Court declined to provide a threshold, in terms of tens of millions, beyond which a financial special contribution should be considered. Since the doctrine of special contribution is to be kept within very narrow bounds it would be unwise and potentially dangerous to encourage litigants or courts to find special contributions where they are not warranted.
The Court did, however, adopt Mr Justice Coleridge’s suggestion that a “tariff of percentage bands” would reduce the uncertainty when assessing special contributions of a financial nature in ‘big money’ cases. The Court held that the appropriate range for the award in the vast majority of cases is between 55% - 45% and 66.6% - 33.3%. Mrs Charman’s award of £48m, representing 36.5% of the total assets, lay squarely in the middle of this range and Sir Mark Potter stated that “neither in its method nor in its result do we regard the judge’s treatment of the husband’s special contribution as vulnerable to appeal”.
· Law Reform
The Court of Appeal dedicated a significant proportion of its judgment to a postscript advocating reform of ancillary relief law in England and Wales. The Court recognised that the replacement of ‘reasonable requirements’ with the ‘yardstick of equality’ by the House of Lords in White was a response to profound social change in the absence of statutory reform. Hugely beneficial though it was, the judgment in White could not have envisaged the socio-economic changes which have made it possible for individuals to develop large fortunes very quickly. The combined effect of these changes and the decision in White has been to raise aspirations of claimants, doubling the size of awards and earning London the reputation of ‘the divorce capital of the world’ without pausing to consider the desirability of these developments. The Court emphasised the need to review the merits of the current law not only in the context of our society but also in the context of our position as a Member State of the European Union.
The Court recognised, with dismay, that many family law practitioners feel that neither White nor Miller and McFarlane have provided the predictability and certainty needed to advise clients on settlement terms. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 is in need of both modernisation and more far reaching reform and this is a task which even the judges of the House of Lords are not equipped to undertake. The Court noted that the Chairman of the Law Commission has been approached with a view to undertaking reforms and lent its full weight to this campaign. The Court identified that any reform must take account of the inter-relationship between our law and the law of other jurisdictions given the recent trend of the wealthy to ‘forum shop’ their way to the most advantageous financial award. The recent cases of Bentinck v Bentinck and Moore v Moore, in which £330,000 and £1.6m of legal fees respectively were spent on jurisdictional arguments, were raised as regrettable consequences of London’s new found reputation. The Court identified the difficulties which the unique features of English law, notably its lack of a marital property regime and failure to afford legal status to pre-nuptial agreements, pose to harmonisation across the European Union. Drawing on previous legislative proposals, the Court suggested that parties should at least have the opportunity to order their own affairs as they choose, by way of a pre-nuptial contract, if they are to be subjected to a divorce regime which is out of step with its European counterparts.
See also
Jane Simpson
James Stewart
The Press
Chambers Guide
The “unstoppable” Helen Ward “is probably the best litigator there is .” She has an excellent support team behind her and is also notable for her “outstanding ability to reach settlements and to ad vise pragmatically .” A star player at the firm, Ward was classed by one barrister as being “undoubtedly one of the five most significant divorce personalities in the country .” 3
Times
'People choose the lawyers that they deserve'4