Marjha Golding-Evans is a partner in IMD’s Family Law team with almost 20 years of dedicated family law experience. She advises high-net-worth individuals, entrepreneurs, business owners, professionals, farming families and landowners on complex family and financial matters.
What was your career path to your current role?
I didn’t come from a family of lawyers and was the first to go to university; I grew up in the South Wales valleys before moving to Cardiff in my teens. At 18, I moved to Nottingham and completed a (now) little known Law LLB ‘sandwich’ degree over 4 years rather than 3, in which the third year was full-time employment at a law firm as a paralegal. Without a doubt this exposure and early experience was a baptism of fire for a slightly unworldly 20 year old, but I well and truly got the family law bug and haven’t looked back since.
I was fortunate to be invited back for a training contract and will forever be indebted to the partners at Hopkin Murray Beskine in London for their faith in me. Nothing grounds you in family law like the high pressure of legal aid work and I remember I once applied for (and had granted) two without notice non-molestation orders for two different clients in one day.
I feel the path to qualification has rightly evolved towards on-the-job training with the creation of legal apprenticeships and the SQE pathway; naturally our lawyers of today need the academic understanding of the law, but I feel strongly it should be coupled with real-time experience and the chance to engage with clients and professionals from day one.
Did you have any other career ambitions
For much of my teenage years, I wanted to be a journalist. I did work experience at Buzz Magazine in Cardiff during my Sixth Form studies and wrote articles for them and I was thrilled to have my name in print although I faced a quandary at the time as the main article chronicled the rise of strip clubs in Cardiff with a fairly provocative image on the magazine cover, and so showing the edition to my aging Nan was quite an experience. My Mum was mortified but to this day I am convinced my Nan was secretly thrilled!
I think my spark for being inquisitive and pursuing the truth was borne from that early interest in journalism. I still enjoy writing articles and blog pieces, but I don’t think Victoria Derbyshire or Naga Munchetty have much to fear!
What keeps you motivated in your work?
The pursuit of fairnesskeeps me motivated more than anything else. Fairness for my clients, fairness for my team, and fairness in the systems we work in. When people feel treated fairly, they are much more likely to conduct themselves in the best way available to them, and do better things as a result.
I also take huge pride in being a working parent who is – I hope – setting a strong example for my daughter. My Dad always told me that the worst anyone could ever say to you was ‘no’, and I have always held that advice close to me and gone for it. I hope I am showing my daughter that if you work hard, you can do anything; that motivates me every day.
What has been the best development in family law in the last 20 years?
I’m a little biased, as I was one of many Resolution lawyers who attended Parliament to personally lobby my MP on No Fault Divorce. But I have no doubt it has been the greatest development in the last 20 years by allowing couples to legally end a marriage without assigning blame, and it replaced an outdated, highly adversarial (some may say patriarchal) system with a process which now feels centred in dignity, honesty, and conflict reduction.
And the worst?
The removal of Legal Aid from most areas of private family law in 2012. It has driven a surge in unrepresented litigants (the Law Society cites that as many as 47% of private law children cases in 2025 had parties representing themselves) and I fear for our strained court system in handling the challenges that can bring. I hope that the widespread roll out of Pathfinder will alleviate some of this pressure, but it is critical we don’t lose sight of the necessity to centre proceedings around the needs of the children involved in them.
I watch with baited breath how our legal aid colleagues can continue to operate given the financial strains in the system, including civil legal aid rates which have been unchanged since 1996 (yes, that is 30 years) despite an almost doubling of inflation during that period. Whilst the government has approved the proposed changes set out in the MoJ consultation, with no date for those proposed changes coming into force, some firms may simply be unable to hang on much longer.
If you could bring in one new piece of legislation for the sector, what would it be and why?
I had the privilege of being invited to contribute to the consultation on ‘A Fairer End to Relationships’, the Law Commission’s consultation on reforming financial remedies on divorce. I wholeheartedly support the aspect which pursues how we best establish rights for our cohabiting clients, but I feel unless we must also tackle the widespread uncertainty that financial remedy proceedings bring; without this we will fail to make the modernisations our current system needs and fail to provide the clarity and fairness that separating couples deserve.
Whilst not family law, if I could legislate for one other thing, it would be that all parking apps had to be combined into one(!) Why is it always that you are trying to park in a rush using an app you don’t have…?!
What piece of legislation would you take off the statute books and why?
I have grave concerns about the impact of the Finance Bill 2025 (which is the legislative vehicle for annual taxation in the UK) in how it affected family farms and estates.
Whilst I don’t advocate that we throw out the entire taxation structure, the impact that the ‘family farm tax’ has had on individuals and families in our agriculture sector will last beyond this generation. I specialise in advising famers and landed estate owners on their family matters, notably around nuptial agreements and divorce, and alongside this I am honoured to sit on two committees for the Country Landowners Association. The CLA lobbied hard to lift the thresholds, which in December 2025 the government raised from £1m to £2.5m; but it remains the collective view that the government hasn’t gone far enough.
I can talk for hours about farming families and the CLA’s work on why these inheritance tax reforms should be scrapped, but this is a good starting point;
What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you regarding your career?
“Sometimes you need to be quiet and listen.”
This transcends career advice and is just good all-round advice in life; read into it what you will…!
What advice would you like to give to someone just starting out?
Being a family lawyer is more than being legally brilliant, you thrive by being rounded. We need to know a lot about many things, and so don’t be afraid to ask questions, get involved and go outside of your comfort zone. As my Dad said, never be afraid that someone will say no!
And one more thing – please pick up the phone; to colleagues, to other lawyers but to your clients in particular. You will get more done in a frank conversation than through dozens of emails or spending hours poring over the tone of certain exchanges.
Tell us something people may be surprised to know about you…
Whilst playing netball for our university team, I learnt to drive a minibus. I played netball from an early age and was sported a stonking black eye in the photo of our County Championship win aged about 12! I have recently got back into playing for a local side, so here’s to hoping there are no more black eyes to come…
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