In the Preface to our first study of the main legal personnel involved in the provision of family justice, Family Lawyers: the Divorce Work of Solicitors (Hart Publishing, 2000), we wrote that from about the mid-1990s, the nature of the debate about legal processes in relation to family matters seemed to have changed. ‘What did seem different … was the intensity of feeling that the legal process had not simply gone wrong, or was in need of improvement, but that it was somehow in its nature completely inappropriate as the mechanism for dealing with family disruption and conflict’. We therefore thought it important to assemble empirical evidence so that ‘if significant change was to be brought about … we should at least understand rather better what it was we would be departing from’. It was with this objective that we examined the work of solicitors in that book, followed later with a description of the relevant work of barristers (Family Law Advocacy: How Barristers Help the Victims of Family Failure (Hart Publishing, 2009)) and the judiciary (Family Justice: The Work of Family Judges in Uncertain Times (Hart Publishing, 2013)). Our sense that a sea-change was occurring in at least official perceptions of the nature and place of law in family matters where the state was not directly involved has been amply confirmed in the years that followed. Official action could not prevent individuals consulting lawyers or using legal processes (though compulsory attendance at Mediation Information and Assessment Meetings was intended to signal the availablity of an enticing alternative), but they could withdraw financial support from those who needed it for those purposes. So when pressures for financial constraint following the financial crisis of 2008 bore down on legal aid funding, private law family legal services were an obvious target. This did not seem to be a purely financial policy. It seemed to be driven also by the attitude we had noted in the 1990s that the law was out of place in this area. This seems to be confirmed by official attempts to encourage the use of mediation in its place, even by making some public funding available for this purpose. Yet, despite the enthusiasm and energy of its advocates, family mediation was an unproven procedure and lacked a coherent institutional framework. There were even sharp divisions about important aspects of its practice.