We are delighted that family law specialist; Kris Seed has joined our growing team.
Kris Seed joins us as a Senior Associate Chartered Legal Executive, and she will also be the head of our new Private Law Children Team. Kris will work closely with Senior Associate Solicitor Lauren Preedy who is the head of our Divorce Team.
As part of our ambitious plans for 2020 we will shortly be moving our Head Office to our own modern offices in Pynes Hill, Exeter, which will provide all our team with a fantastic workspace and which will enable us to improve our client experience even further. (More news to follow…).
We have also undertaken a major internal re-organisation.
In addition to the recruitment of Kris Seed as Head of Private Law Children and Lauren Preedy as Head of Divorce, we will shortly be joined by an experienced Management Accountant as our Head of Finance and by an additional experienced Public Law Children Specialist Solicitor.
Ian Walker currently remains Head of our Public Law Children Team and Head of our Mediation Team. But by September our team will include 12 qualified and experienced family lawyers. Our team also includes recent recruit Briony Kingston in Bristol.
The role that Kris is taking is particularly important.
Kris Seed is a very experienced Chartered Legal Executive. Before moving to Devon she had worked for nearly 18 years at Stephens Scown in Truro, gaining promotions to Senior Associate. Kris then joined Everys in Exeter in 2016. Kris became the head of the Everys Family Department.
Coincidentally, Kris was recruited to Everys by our very own Kim Stradling who before she joined us, was the long-standing head of Everys Family Law Department. Kim is one of the leading child law specialist solicitors in the south-west.
As Head of our Private Law Children Team, Kris’s role will be to ensure that we fully meet the needs of clients who need assistance with matters such as: Residence and Contact (and other child arrangements) disputes, Adoption, Surrogacy and Relocation. Kris will also be responsible for sharing her knowledge and expertise with our trainee solicitors and legal executives.
Kris will continue to undertake a mixture of divorce work and private law children work. As a divorce lawyer, Kris has particular expertise in high net worth cases. And she worked for many years in what was arguably the strongest family law team in Cornwall.
Having a separate head of private law children means that it would be easier for us to manage enquiries and cases and to ensure that clients and matched to the team member best suited to their case.
Ian Walker explains:
These days most family lawyers tend to specialise in either divorce work (which includes some children work – mainly between parents) or public law children work (mostly social services cases) and lawyers can become quite siloed. Sometimes this means that the expertise of the most experienced child law solicitors (often members of the Law Society children panel) can be lost to clients in less complex (but nevertheless very important) children law cases. We have avoided such pitfalls so far, but as we have grown, it is important for us to put in place a structure which ensures that we can manage the allocation and oversight of cases in the best possible way as we move forward and achieve further growth. Kris will therefore work closely with both out Head of Divorce and Head of Public Law Children to ensure that the very considerable expertise within our team is available to all of our clients.
I am particularly conscious of this problem (perhaps more so than others) because I have always enjoyed having a caseload which included all aspects of family law work. Most of my contemporaries gave up on this approach years ago and tend to be either divorce lawyers or children lawyers. Sometimes the needs of clients can get lost between different priorities – especially when a team is busy. It is important to me that this doesn’t happen in my practice.
Our ambitious growth plan for 2020 is coming together (despite the additional challenges caused by Covid-19. Kris is a fantastic addition to the team. And I am delighted that there will be others to follow. By the time we get to September we will have one of the very strongest teams of family lawyers in the South-West.
Law was a second career for Kris. Kris originally worked as a nurse.
Kris is a very proactive person and amongst her achievements she has run the London Marathon and swam the English Channel. Kris has also been a football referee, owned a bakery in Cornwall and in her spare time these days is a swimming teacher.
Most importantly, as well as being outstanding lawyer, Kris is good company and will be an asset to our team.
We are all looking forward to moving to our new head office and an expansion of our overall office network. We are the winners of the Modern Law Awards 2020 in the category of Boutique Law Firm of the Year (11+ employees).
