The public record, in family law, is what’s left when discretion fails. Most of that work is done privately: a separation worth tens of millions resolved in chambers, in a single afternoon, with neither a judge nor a public record. What reaches the headlines therefore is just a fraction of the work that crosses a family lawyer’s desk. As one family lawyer tells Spear’s, they are ‘only the ones you are allowed to talk about’ while a full range of complex cases sit behind the curtain.
That is the fact the Spear’s Family Lawyers Index is built around. Over recent years, the centre of gravity in high-value family law has shifted out of the courtroom and into a subtler apparatus of private hearings and arbitration.
Two forces have driven the evolution, according to the top lawyers featured in the 2026 edition of the Spear’s Index. The first is a court system that practitioners, almost uniformly, describe as ‘broken’. The second is a new breed of client: one who would rather settle in private than win in public.
What now distinguishes a leading family lawyer is judgement: knowing which cases to settle and which to fight. It shows in the agreements signed long before a marriage falters, in the divorces concluded without a line in the press, and, where there are children, in two parents left able to raise them once the lawyers have gone. It is that judgement, more than any reported win, that the advisers in this year’s Index are known for.
Related
Explore the 2026 Spear’s Family Law Indices:
- Best family law barristers
- Best family lawyers in the US
- Best family lawyers in the Middle East
- Best divorce consultancy and support services
Trends in 2026
The flight from the courtroom
No subject surfaced more often in this year’s research than the state of the family courts. Practitioners across the country no longer treat the court as the natural place to resolve a dispute. Securing a hearing, says Payne Hicks Beach director Alex O’Dwyer Curran, has become ‘like trying to get a GP appointment’. The system, agrees Lois Langton of Howard Kennedy, is simply ‘broken’.
The consequence has been a decisive move toward non-court dispute resolution. Private financial dispute resolution (FDR) hearings – where the parties pay a senior barrister or retired judge to evaluate the case in confidence – are now treated as the default. ‘I pretty much only do private FDRs now,’ Carina Smith of Weightmans tells Spear’s.
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Luned Rees Williams of Camilla Baldwin reaches for the comparison several advisers use to explain the appeal to clients: it is, she says, ‘a bit like we’re bypassing the NHS and just going to BUPA’.
Arbitration is growing alongside it. Increasingly, couples are hiring a private specialist to settle the case in a judge’s place, on terms that bind them both. For years, the route was held back by a flaw: unlike a court ruling, an arbitrator’s award was almost impossible to overturn, even when it was wrong, which made lawyers wary of steering clients toward it. That changed in 2020, when the Court of Appeal in Haley v Haley held that a family arbitration could be challenged on the same basis as a judge’s decision.
[See also: Divorce Italian style: As HNWs flock to Italy, so are family law firms]
With the deterrent gone, take-up has climbed steadily since. Alistair Myles, a founding partner of Ribet Myles, who acted in that case, says the effect has been visible: ‘Now I’m seeing a lot more arbitration.’
The shift has reached children work too. Sarfraz Ali, a senior associate at Withers, says that over the past 18 months every children case he has had that needed a determination has been resolved by arbitration rather than the court, which he calls ‘a real turning point’.
Standish v Standish
One judgment has done more to reshape how the field advises than any other in recent years. In Standish v Standish, decided by the Supreme Court in 2025, a husband who had moved some £80 million to his wife for tax reasons saw her argue that the money had become a shared asset. The court ruled it had not: wealth brought into a marriage or inherited now stays ring-fenced unless the couple have treated it as shared – and moving it into a spouse’s name to save tax does not, by itself, count as sharing it.
Sam Longworth of Stewarts, who acted for the husband in the case, was named Family Lawyer of the Year at the Spear’s Awards in 2025 for his work.
The practical result of Standish v Standish is a move from reactive litigation toward preventative advice, with family teams increasingly working alongside private client and trustee colleagues to structure wealth years before any breakdown.
Nuptial agreements sit at the centre of this. ‘Prenup season’, the spring-to-summer run-up to weddings, is now a fixture of the calendar, and the agreements are increasingly drawn up as part of a wider plan rather than a standalone document. As Jemma Pollock of Russell-Cooke explains, clients are ‘increasingly focused on prenuptial agreements, cohabitation arrangements and declarations of trust’ as part of how they protect and pass on wealth.
London and its challengers
Almost every high-value family lawyer in this edition of the Index reports that an international dimension to cases is now the rule rather than the exception; many tell Spear’s they cannot recall a recent case without one. London remains, in the words of Eliza Hebditch of Expatriate Law, ‘the divorce capital of the world’, prized for the breadth of the English court’s disclosure powers and its generosity ‘in terms of capital and in maintenance’. That pull continues to draw jurisdiction races and forum disputes into the English courts.
Simultaneously, advisers point to the rise of the Abu Dhabi Civil Family Court, where, as Dubai-based Byron James of Expatriate Law notes, a custody and finance dispute that might take a year to reach a first hearing in England can be concluded in four weeks.
Closer to home, changes to the non-dom regime have prompted wealthy clients to leave for Italy, Dubai, Monaco and elsewhere, with several firms opening continental offices in response. The conflict in the Middle East is also reshaping caseloads directly: Toby Atkinson of Stewarts reports a run of enquiries arising from it, from parents seeking to relocate out of the UAE to children caught on the wrong side of a closed border.
The privacy premium
For high-profile clients, the engine behind the turn to privacy is discretion. ‘Once you get to a certain level in life, you don’t want to be in the law reports,’ says Sonny Patel of Expatriate Law. Reputation, for these clients, is an asset in its own right, and arbitration and private FDRs allow a separation to be concluded away from open court and from the legal bloggers and journalists now admitted to family hearings.
The biggest achievement, argues Isabella Savill of Payne Hicks Beach, ‘is the cases that you resolve without getting anywhere near a courtroom’. The corollary, and a useful corrective to how the profession markets itself, is that the most significant work in this Index is invisible intentionally.
Looking ahead
The most consequential change on the horizon is legislative. A wide-ranging government consultation on financial remedies and cohabitation reform – described by Emma Collins of Weightmans, who was a long-standing member of the Resolution drafting committee, as potentially the most significant change to family finance law in a generation – could finally extend claims to cohabiting couples, now the fastest-growing family type and at present among the least protected. The persistence of the ‘common law marriage’ myth, several advisers note, leaves people who have lived together for decades with no claim at all.
[See also: Will ‘Child Focused Courts’ help or hinder the UK’s backlogged legal system?]
Further currents are gathering pace: coercive and controlling behaviour is now recognised and argued in ways it was not a few years ago, supported by trauma-informed practice and a sharper understanding of economic abuse, which advisers are at pains to point out appears in the wealthiest cases as readily as the poorest.
The profession is also weighing both the promise and the limits of artificial intelligence: clients increasingly arrive having ‘asked the machine’, while crypto and digital assets have made non-disclosure easier and left the Form E (a disclosure form), in the view of many, no longer fit for purpose. The 2026 Family Law Survey, which canvassed the opinions of 60 leading family lawyers and barristers, revealed that asset concealment and non-disclosure has become a very significant challenge in divorce cases.
Runners and riders
The rankings are reassessed every cycle and 2026 brings movement at the top.
Byron James of Expatriate Law makes the most telling jump to the Top Flight rankings, his rise mirroring the larger story of Abu Dhabi emerging as a genuine rival to London. Sam Longworth of Stewarts enters on the back of the Standish win, and Sarah Williams of Forsters on the strength of her children law and surrogacy cases.
Several names also enter the Spear’s Index for the first time. Clare Wiseman of Irwin Mitchell for her work in UHNW cases; James Netto of the International Family Law Group is recognised for his work with Kenyan families seeking to establish the parentage of children fathered by British soldiers stationed in the country; and Maria Fiorito, newly at Vardags and dual-qualified in England and Italy, is well placed for a time when tax reforms in London are steering wealthy families toward Milan and Florence.
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- Methodology
- Best family lawyers: some names to know
- Best family lawyers: the complete list
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Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to The Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
Best family lawyers: some names to know
Nick Manners
- Focus: Children law and financial remedy
- Ranking: Top Recommended
- Firm: Payne Hicks Beach
‘In our world [of family law], you have to be available, empathetic and energetic,’ Nick Manners, head of the family department at Payne Hicks Beach, tells Spear’s. ‘You have to make quick decisions and think on your feet.’
Manners has spent the past decade climbing the ranks at the firm, working closely with the legendary Baroness Shackleton throughout his career.
He has been involved in many of the firm’s most notable family law cases, including the Princess Haya vs Sheikh Maktoum divorce case, Appleton & Gallagher v News Group Newspaper and PA [2015], Ciccone v Ritchie [2016], Barclay v Barclay [2021] and Potanin v Potanina [2025]. On the latter, he says that it was ‘a real career highlight’ to take a case ‘from the first phone call all the way through to the Supreme Court’.
Read Nick Manners’ full profile at Spears500.com
Sarah Williams
- Focus: High-value financial disputes
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: Forsters
‘We are a generation of people that have often been shaped by the horrific divorces of parents, and we want to do things differently; we want genuinely good relationships with our children,’ says Sarah Williams, one of the UK’s leading children law experts.
An authority on highly complex surrogacy, adoption and fertility matters, Williams joined Forsters from Payne Hicks Beach in 2025 to lead the development of the firm’s children practice. Her caseload increasingly includes challenging fertility matters and landmark rulings. ‘It’s been an amazing move, with some very high‑profile cases, which have been incredibly exciting,’ she says.
Read Sarah Williams’ full profile at Spears500.com
Sam Longworth
- Focus: Big money cases
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: Stewarts
A long-standing member of Stewarts’ family team and named Family Lawyer of the Year at the 2025 Spear’s Awards, partner Sam Longworth knows the importance of moving quickly on complex divorce cases.
‘My goal is to put clients in a position to make fully informed decisions as to their next steps – and do so from the very first meeting,’ he tells Spear’s. Longworth has been involved in a number of high-profile cases; he is best known for his involvement in Standish v Standish, acting for the husband in the landmark case, which narrows the scope of what counts as matrimonial property and signals a shift in how pre-marital wealth and intra-spousal transfers are treated in divorce.
Read Sam Longworth’s full profile at Spears500.com
Miranda Fisher
- Focus: International UHNWs
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: Charles Russell Speechlys
Charles Russell Speechlys partner and head of international family law Miranda Fisher is well known for her experience in high-value, often international, family law cases, from complex financial disputes to the most difficult children matters.
Highlighting her 27 years of experience, Fisher tells Spear’s she never over-promises. ‘I tell the truth – the reality of the situation. What I like to convey to a client is the importance of integrity. I would never encourage a client to run a case that I do not think I could win.’
Read Miranda Fisher’s full profile at Spears500.com
Ayesha Vardag
- Focus: High-value litigation
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: Vardags
One of the leading names in family law, Ayesha Vardag specialises in high-net-worth divorce, with cases often having an international or celebrity element. Her eponymous firm has offices across the UK as well as in Europe (Milan and Florence so far), and Vardag has vast experience on multi-jurisdictional cases, many of which take place in the UK because of the robustness of its legal system.
‘There is such a magnetic draw to English matrimonial law,’ she tells Spear’s. ‘We have a straightforward, non-corrupt judiciary, huge powers of disclosure and forensic investigation.’
Worwood is especially known for her expertise in international child relocation. She co-chairs the relocation committee of the International Academy of Family Lawyers and in 2025 was invited to Washington DC to speak at a global forum marking 15 years since the Washington Declaration – a set of principles aimed at improving the handling of international child relocation disputes.
Read Ayesha Vardag’s full profile on Spears500.com
Luned Rees Williams
- Focus: French and English law
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: Camilla Baldwin
A partner at Mayfair family law boutique Camilla Baldwin, Luned Rees Williams handles the divorces and prenuptial agreements of the international wealthy. Fluent in French and English, she is drawn to cross-border work: ‘Anything European, international, I absolutely love doing.’
Her recent caseload has included multi-jurisdictional prenups, including one for an entrepreneur with assets across several countries: a European agreement binding across the continent was backed by a second in England and Wales to cover everywhere else. ‘It’s basically a worldwide prenup, so to speak,’ she explains.
Read Luned Rees Williams’ full profile on Spears500.com
Suzanne Todd
- Focus: Complex international financial cases
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: Withers
Suzanne Todd is one of the most highly regarded family lawyers working internationally. A partner at Withers, she is described by one top KC as ‘absolutely superb in what she does’ and an ‘incredible performer’.
In September 2026, Todd will become president of the International Academy of Family Lawyers, the membership of which spans more than 1,000 of the leading practitioners worldwide – a role for which she has stepped down as head of Withers’ London family team.
Read Suzanne Todd’s full profile on Spears500.com
John Davies
- Focus: Cases with an international element
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: Farrer & Co
A partner at Farrer & Co, family lawyer John Davies acts for clients whose scarcest asset is their time.
What such cases demand, he says, is human insight: ‘establishing that rapport with people’, gaining an understanding of what matters most to them, and then ‘problem solving at the top of the game’.
In acting for a member of the Luxembourg royal family, discretion was, in his words, ‘the name of the game’ – and in cases like these he manages privacy through tools such as arbitration to keep sensitive matters out of open court.
Read John Davies’ full profile at Spears500.com
Alistair Myles
- Focus: Cross-jurisdictional financial remedy cases
- Ranking: Top Recommended
- Firm: Ribet Myles
A founding partner of Ribet Myles, Alistair Myles left an established firm in 2021 to establish one of London’s new wave of family law boutiques, following a more modern and less costly model. The lower overheads of a leaner firm, he says, are passed back to the client in ‘pretty competitive’ rates.
His cases, he says, are defined less by the overall value of assets involved than by the difficulty of the law. They are ‘not necessarily the ones with hundreds of millions of pounds, but the ones with interesting points of law and quite technical, complex points’. He works across trusts, complex financial remedy matters and private children disputes for HNW clients.
Read Alistair Myles’ full profile on Spears500.com
James Stewart
- Focus: Complex settlements
- Ranking: Top Flight
- Firm: Penningtons Manches Cooper
James Stewart of Penningtons Manches Cooper has a formidable record of getting results in even the most difficult of family law cases.
He describes his role as bringing ‘real added value’ to complex financial cases, applying a creative and solution-orientated approach. He tells Spear’s he wants clients to ‘feel at ease’ that they will receive the benefit of a service which is ‘second to none’.
Read James Stewart’s full profile at Spears500.com
James Netto
- Focus: Complex cases with an international dimension
- Ranking: Recommended
- Firm: International Family Law Group
A partner at the International Family Law Group, James Netto is one of a small number of solicitors who often act for children rather than their parents. These include abduction cases, forced marriages and disputes where a child takes a stand against their own family. The point, he is careful to say, is not to simply indulge them. ‘I’m not just a platform for a kid to get their way,’ he says. ‘It’s about having [their] voice heard.’
That principle was tested in a case involving a London teenager taken to Ghana by his parents under the pretext of visiting a sick relative, then left there. The boy instructed Netto and challenged the move; the Court of Appeal ultimately backed his right to be heard. What is new, Netto argues, is not just that a child’s wishes matter in the eyes of the law, but that they have personal representation. ‘It’s the act of having a lawyer represent a kid, as opposed to a child just being subject to other people talking about him or her,’ he explains.
Read James Netto’s full profile at Spears500.com
Best family lawyers: the complete list
Click on the individual names to be directed to more detailed profiles of each adviser on The Spear’s 500 website. The table is ordered by ranking and then alphabetically by surname.
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