I wonder if anyone can help me? Myself and DP have recently gone through a lot of hassle with his ex partner and mother of his kids. After nearly 7 years of them being seperated with no problems, she has recently decided that she wants to cause us problems and get a solicitor to arrange "consistant" visitation between DP and his kids. He has always had them once a month since they split, this is due to the fact that we live over 200 miles away from them and we cant afford to travel there more than once a month. This has never been a problem until now she not only wants us to go when she wants each month (not always possible as DP works shifts) and also wants us to go more than once a month.
Anyway to cut a very long story short she got a solicitor involved and we got our own solicitor initially, however we only saw our solicitor once and that coupled with a couple of letters and phonecalls cost us nearly £600 (hers doesnt cost anything as she gets legal aid)! Since then we have been communicating directly with her solicitor and everything seemed to be going okay. However at the beginning of July we wrote to the Solicitor outlining our proposed visits for the rest of the year up until January 2006 and also regarding contact at Xmas. Despite writing again in August and emailing the solicitor a couple of weeks ago, we have heard absolutely nothing regarding this or regarding the parental responsibility for DP that she was supposed to be signing over 3 months ago.
We think (from his tone on previous conversations) that the Solicitor may have got fed up with her loud mouth attitude and stopped dealing with her (not surprising as that is why DP no longer speaks to her). Does anyone know if this would be a reason for the Solicitor to stop answering our correspondance or should he have at least advised us of the situation? We do not know how we are supposed to establish contact arrangements with her if she is no longer going through a solicitor as we cannot deal with her directly.
We have written to the Solicitor to ask if he could just let us know if he is no longer dealing with her, but have still received no reply. Is this standard practice? If he is no longer dealing with her, does that mean that we can no longer deal with him without paying for it? Sorry to make this a long thread, but we really do not know what to do for the best and cannot afford to go through our own Solicitor again.