London firm offers divorce vouchers for Christmas

According to the firm, Lloyd Platt & Company will issue gift vouchers for half an hour and an hour of legal advice through its website or by post after claiming to have been “inundated” by requests from clients.

A press release states that the idea for the “gift of the year” came after a client’s relative said that they wished to make a contribution towards the client’s divorce, and senior partner Vanessa Lloyd Platt suggested that she provide a gift voucher, to ‘soften’ the fact that the relative was making such a contribution.

Lloyd Platt stated that those now requesting the vouchers include husbands and wives who have said: “this is an ideal way that they can finally broach the subject that they no longer wish to be in the marriage.”

As well as “mistresses enquiring as to the amounts that they can pay and vouchers that they can buy for their lovers, to finally get on with the promise of divorcing their wives.”

And while Lloyd Platt has also stated that, “some have commented that this is a ‘blinder’ of a present and very different from the normal electronic gadgets they were envisaging”, other family lawyers are less enthusiastic.

Joint head of Mills & Reeve’s national family law team Roger Bamber said: “It’s an interesting publicity angle. A lot of firms do free first interviews, which is what this essentially sounds like, but anything that trivialises divorce or gets people to think about divorce in a superficial way is unhelpful.”

“When you are dealing with children’s lives and managing transition it’s not good and we won’t be running out to copy them. It’s fine if you’re selling glasses but this is about children’s lives. Even if I was a client it wouldn’t be for me and as a professional it’s not for me either.”