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Legal Director
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Family Lawyers
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London
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Children law
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Legal Advisory Services
Alex O'Dwyer Curran
Spear’s Review
Alex O’Dwyer Curran, a legal director at Payne Hicks Beach, works at the sharpest end of family law, often acting alongside Baroness Shackleton on disputes where the assets at stake can run into the hundreds of millions.
A growing theme in his work is the involvement of the wider family in a divorce: it is increasingly common, he tells Spear’s, for a spouse to discover that assets they assumed were the couple’s own are in fact held by a parent or in-law.
Untangling such questions is not getting easier in an overstretched system, O’Dwyer Curran says. With time in court ‘like trying to get a GP appointment’, much of his work is moving to arbitration, including a recent Children Act case for a former FTSE 100 chief executive.
His most complex cases are guided by a lesson from Baroness Shackleton: think three steps ahead.
Read next: Lessons for UHNWs from the Brooklyn Beckham family dispute
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