Surviving Your Divorce: A Guide to Canadian Family Law. 2nd ed.

Leslie H. Morley is a practising lawyer with a particular interest in
immigration and family law.

As Michael Cochrane points out, more than one-quarter of Canadian
marriages end in divorce and a sizable number of divorces end up in
contested court proceedings. Surviving Your Divorce is intended to help
people negotiate their way through the intricacies of the divorce. In
addition to the expected chapters on divorce, property division,
support, domestic contracts, and the rights of common-law spouses, there
are useful sections on the emotional stages of marriage breakdown,
dealing with lawyers, alternatives to court, negotiations and consents,
recourse when the system lets you down, and conducting your own
research. The author draws on a number of nonlegal sources, including
statistical evidence, social studies, personal observations, anecdote,
and practical wisdom. The legal context is Canadian, including federal
and provincial law.

Cochrane, an Ontario lawyer and former policy adviser with the attorney
general of that province, effectively adopts a client-centred approach.
While he might usefully have focused attention on the legal aid system,
and while his review of domestic violence issues would have benefited
from reference to the well-developed literature on the subject, these
are relatively minor problems. Surviving Your Divorce is a must-read for
family-law litigants and their lawyers.