The best strategic advice Alexandra Cracknell gives about finding of fact hearings is to avoid them like the plague, and she does not say it flippantly. In over ten years at the family bar she has almost never seen one parent come out entirely exonerated and the other entirely damned. There are usually findings of blame on both sides, because these are human relationships, and very few of them survive a breakdown without arguments and poor behaviour somewhere.
That is where the session starts: how to work out whether a fact find is genuinely necessary and proportionate, what to explore with a client before you commit them to one, and what alternatives might get you to the welfare stage without one. From there it becomes a working advocacy masterclass. Forensic chronologies rather than basic ones. Witness statements that anticipate the other side. Schedules built on headline, risk and particulars rather than the old Scott schedule boxes. Examination in chief, where she says the advocate has to disappear. Cross examination as a conversation rather than a fight. And a closing set out the way the judge will set out the judgment.
It is practical throughout and drawn from her own cases, including a fact find she conducted the week before recording. The running theme is that advocacy is the art of storytelling, and that almost every technique in the session exists to make life easier for the judge who has to decide.
Key Takeaways
- When a finding of fact hearing is actually necessary and proportionate, applying Oxfordshire and Practice Direction 12J, and how to test your client's account before you commit them to one
- Building a forensic chronology that cross references instructions, police disclosure, safeguarding letters and local authority material, so you know the case better than your client does
- Drafting witness statements that tell the story and deal with the other side's points, including why you must read the whole of any message exchange your client wants to exhibit
- Her alternative to the Scott schedule: headline, the risk said to arise, then particulars, and how to plead coercive and controlling behaviour by lifting the statutory definition
- Examination in chief, open questions, reverse leading when a witness dries up, and putting the respondent's own words to your client
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