New Resource! Separation Agreements: Your Right to Fairness

New on Clicklaw

wcleaf-separationagreements

West Coast LEAF’s Separation Agreements: Your Right to Fairness is a plain language booklet that gives a general overview of some of the financial issues that arise during separation and divorce. The booklet provides tips for making sure a separation agreement is fair, discusses legal tools for protecting family property, and describes the law governing when the court can set aside an unfair agreement. While the legal information contained in the booklet applies to everyone, the booklet is geared towards women, who tend to face particularly critical financial challenges when they separate from a spouse.

Marital breakdown has a profound impact on many women’s economic security. Because of women’s primary responsibility for childcare and greater likelihood of leaving the paid labour force when their children are young, as well as the lack of affordable child care and continued pay inequity on the job, women earn less money overall. Lower earnings, combined with a lack of access to legal aid, make it much harder for women to access justice in family law cases.

Moreover, women may be denied information about the family finances and may not have access to important financial documents held by their ex-husbands. Language barriers and cultural taboos around women’s involvement in the family’s finances compound the challenges.

Separation Agreements: Your Right to Fairness seeks to provide crucial financial information to women who need it. We recently updated the booklet, in collaboration with the Legal Services Society (LSS), to reflect changes to the law resulting from the new Family Law Act. We are also partnering with LSS to translate the booklet into five additional languages (Punjabi, Spanish, Tagalog, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese), which will be available this spring.

Hard copies of the booklet can be ordered free from the Crown Publications Service.

Thank you to Laura Track, Legal Director from Clicklaw Contributor West Coast LEAF, for providing this article on their new resource. — Clicklaw Editorial Team

Court Forms – you have questions, we have answers!

Get help using Clicklaw, New on Clicklaw

Court rules, forms, and self-help guides to court proceduresEvery day, somewhere in BC, a person approaches a librarian and asks, “Can you help me find a court form?”

This seemingly simple question has so many potential answers. The court forms are different depending on whether the file is family or civil. They change completely depending on whether the action is in Provincial Court or Supreme Court. And getting help might mean finding the form you need, the rule that decides it or it might mean figuring out how to use it. It might mean all three.

I can only imagine how daunting that this would be for someone new to the legal system. And while there are excellent resources out there, sometimes you need signposts to get you there.

After assisting a number of people at the front desk and speaking with public librarians in different parts of BC, I starting thinking: what if we could direct people to a tool that would mimic the help a librarian at Courthouse Libraries would provide? If you weren’t sure where to go, could there be a single page to get you started using BC court forms?

I am so pleased to say that thanks to a fantastic team of people, Clicklaw now has a simple tool that does just this. You can find it in the footer on each page under Laws, Cases and Rules – Forms, Self-Help Guides, or through our new Common Question featured on the homepage, Where can I find the rules, forms and guides for court?

This simple flowchart allows people to start with the idea that they need help with a form and quickly get to the right resources. If someone is unsure of the answer to a question, we’ve built in some “I don’t knows” to try to help get them moved through and ultimately connected with the resources that will help.

Try it out. As with any new idea, we would love feedback. Let us know if it’s helping you (or your clients), or if there is something we could do better.

Thank you to everyone who made this happen. It was truly a team effort. It involved the work of a number of Courthouse Libraries BC staff and was only possible because of the resources of our outstanding Clicklaw contributor community.