Pauline Fowler

Spear’s Review

Pauline Fowler has worked with Frances Hughes since 1985, first at Bates, Wells & Braithwaite, and now as co-founding partners at Hughes Fowler Carruthers. Both are well-known and respected family lawyers.

Fowler has continued to receive significant instructions throughout her career on a wide range of matters, nearly all of them with an international element, preferring to find solutions outside court where possible. She has a varied practice that covers UHNW finances as well as every aspect of children’s law, including surrogacy and international adoption.

She is a long-standing fellow of the International Academy of Family Lawyers, a member of the Pensions Advisory Group, and a member of Resolution, having chaired its pensions, tax and financial remedies committee for many years.

Adviser Profile

A ‘steely’ and ‘brilliant’ lawyer, Pauline Fowler is noted for her great skill as a litigator and a mediator, and for her ‘stellar’ and ‘entirely deserved reputation’. Fowler possesses ‘immense wisdom’ in understanding how to resolve the trickiest of matters, and approaches every case with a ‘winning attitude’. Peers praise her for being ‘calm in the most stressful situations’ while also being ‘formidable yet personable’.

She is renowned for her ‘vast experience’ in representing high and ultra-high-net-worth clients in divorce proceedings involving substantial cross-border assets, and for the ‘second to none’ support she offers her clients. Pauline is also well versed in complex children’s work, including international adoption, surrogacy and modern families. She is a highly regarded senior mediator, well known for her work in this area. 

Pauline is consistently recognised as a leading family lawyer in the top legal and high-net-worth directories. She has been praised for being ‘extremely clever and focused on getting a good outcome for clients’, and as ‘a formidable practitioner’ who thinks outside the box. One source notes that ‘Pauline is a very effective problem solver’, continuing that ‘she has a good sense of what is going to be the right decision in a case, which comes from her vast experience but also her insight’. 

Another peer enthused that Pauline is ‘really precise, very attentive to detail and tactically strong. She is very pragmatic and good at working with the other side. She technically brilliant.’ 

Outside of the office, Pauline maintains a keen interest in music, and is an accomplished violinist and pianist.