A divorce case that ran for a decade has highlighted the need for an overhaul in the Family Court, as well as the benefit of pre-nups, a high-profile lawyer says.
A bitter divorce battle that has dragged through the courts for a decade has finally come to an end after a judge ruled it was time for the couple to “move on with their lives”.
The acrimonious legal spat centred on how much money should be split between the couple, with the applicant claiming her ex-husband “systematically disposed of significant sums of relationship property” through a trust and his father’s bank accounts.
The court has rejected the woman’s claims, finding her ex was credible and “remarkably well-balanced”.
Top divorce lawyer Lady Deborah Chambers, KC, said the case demonstrated how “hopeless” some Family Court’s rules were, saying the system needed an overhaul to prevent couples wasting huge amounts of money trying to get justice.
The warring couple, whom the court has given the fake names of Sarah Lawson and Barry Goff, were together for 15 years before their separation, according to court documents detailing the lengthy case.
Goff, who came to New Zealand from South Africa in the mid-1990s, said his parents had significant funds in South Africa, which they transferred to New Zealand bank accounts. Lawson did not accept this to be true.
Goff claimed to have brought considerably more assets to the relationship than Lawson.
In March 2014, the Alice Goff Trust (AGT) was established, settled by Goff’s father, with Goff as a trustee and discretionary beneficiary.
He said the AGT held funds gifted by relatives, and his own inheritances and savings from the years after his and Lawson’s separation.
Their relationship ended in February 2015, and Lawson began proceedings in July that year. The case went to trial in 2023, at which point one judge described it as having “swollen to an extraordinary volume”.
Lawson’s arguments at trial were “scattershot”, an earlier court decision said, with the judge expressing concern that her application “invoked virtually every single actionable provision under the [Property (Relationships) Act].”
Lawson described the crux of the matter as being that Goff had transferred large amounts of money into the AGT and had tried to hide the transfers by moving them through multiple bank accounts.
She claimed he had fabricated debts, loans, and other reasons to justify the transfers.
Goff, meanwhile, told the court he had combined personal funds with relationship property and family funds to get better investment returns for everyone, which led to frequent transfers between accounts. He kept spreadsheets to track these transfers and the returns.
Lawson alleged Goff had removed about $2.3 million of relationship property, with a net loss to the relationship property pool of about $1.3m.
At trial, the judge considered Goff to have a “remarkably balanced attitude”, whereas she found Lawson to have developed such a negative view of Goff that it had distorted her recollection of events to the “point of unreliability”.
She rejected Lawson’s claims at trial, and Lawson then appealed in the High Court at Auckland.
The appeal judge rejected most of Lawson’s points but ruled in her favour on some.
On appeal, the judge reclassified a $310,000 debt owed to Goff and nearly $50,000 in savings for his elder sons as relationship property. The judge also revalued Lawson’s life insurance policies as $27,000, rather than $50,000.
The ruling left Lawson with $189,000 more than she previously had, but she has since sought leave to appeal again.
In a recent decision, Justice Jane Anderson has declined leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal.
“This protracted litigation has dragged on in the courts for nearly a decade. [Lawson] bears much of the responsibility for this. She has had many opportunities to make her case and has been allowed to advance arguments late and/or has failed to properly focus her case, in the Family Court and in this court. There is a desperate need for finality,” the judge said.
She ruled there was not enough public or private interest to justify a further appeal.
“It is important for the parties to move on with their lives.”
Lady Chambers said it was clear the Lawson and Goff case had “gone completely off course”, which she said was “very sad for everyone involved”.
“Both the husband and the wife would have spent a fortune on lawyers.”
She said “discovery”, the process by which parties must share relevant documents and information, would have caused it to take so long.
“The problem is ... it was a pretty long relationship. Not all the bank accounts existed, et cetera. He’s said, ‘I have got spreadsheets,’ she said, ‘You’re lying.’
“I can understand why she wanted discovery and why that is so important to getting justice. The problem is that the Family Court hasn’t dealt with discovery in an efficient way.”
The rules around discovery were “hopeless”, particularly compared to the High Court, which had a “robust” way of managing the process, she said.
It would make sense to have an automatic process by which certain categories of documents must be disclosed to parties, so people did not need to apply for each piece of information and wait for the case to be put before a judge, which could take eight or nine months.
“Meanwhile, their clients are burning through the money.”
An automatic process would “save a lot of agony” and would not be a difficult law change to make, she said. The Family Court “clearly needs a total overhaul” on this point.
The delay in getting hearings was another key reason why the case had dragged on so long. When parties were waiting the better part of a year just for an interlocutory decision, it was easy for the timeline to continually extend.
The third big factor was the arguments being made in this particular matter. Lady Chambers said Lawson’s case was “chaotic” and “disorganised”.
One of her appeals contained 56 points on which she wished to appeal, and each of the parties filed more than 20 affidavits, containing what the courts described as “granular” detail.
Lady Chambers said the case was one in which emotions had taken over and Lawson was “engaged in a war and wasn’t going to stop”.
For other couples at the beginning of their relationships who wanted to avoid getting caught in years-long court cases, she recommended looking at pre-nuptial agreements, particularly for those with complicated financial situations.
If couples ended up in litigation, the best scenario was when lawyers convinced their clients to hand over the documents needed for discovery, then sat down in mediation and came to a settlement everyone could agree on.
“Things are never black and white ... the Family Court is full of shades of grey. It looks like a reasonably fair result [was] eventually obtained.”
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 12 years.