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Legal Director
Caroline Lynch
Caroline is Family Rights Group’s Legal Director and a member of the charity’s senior leadership team.
Caroline was called to the Bar in 2003. She has specialised in children public law for over 20 years, practising at the independent bar, within local government and in the voluntary sector. She is a door tenant at Dere Street Chambers.
Caroline supports Family Rights Group to develop and deliver its strategic goals. She leads the charity’s legal influencing, law reform work, and the strategic use of the law across the organisation. She works closely with policy and social work colleagues, and the charity’s family panels on a range of system change workstreams.
Caroline heads up an award-winning legal team whose work supports innovation and system change, provides public legal education and underpins the charity’s advice, policy and influencing activity. Under Caroline’s leadership, the legal team has expanded in size and influence. In 2024 they were named Children’s Legal Team of the Year at the Lexis Nexis Family Law Awards and are shortlisted for the Legal Team of the Year 2026 award at the Employed Bar Awards.
Caroline regularly sits on external advisory groups including the Public Law Working Group, where she was the principal author of the Supervision Order Best Practice Guidance.
Caroline’s recent law reform work includes:
- Kinship care defined in statutory guidance and, for the first time, primary legislation: A success for the charity’s Time to Define proposal and campaign conceived and led by Caroline.
- Kinship Local Offer duty: Caroline developed the Kinship Local Offer proposal, which was first integrated into statutory guidance, and then into primary legislation by the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Act 2026.
Caroline’s system change project work has included:
- Design and delivery of Reimagining pre-proceedings (2022-26). A workstream to drive system change in how local family justice areas approach early work with children and families. This generated a new, independently evaluated, approach to encourage and embed stronger effective partnership working with families, helping to safely avert the need for care proceedings.
- Care Crisis Review, 2017. Part of the Family Rights Group team facilitating this unique sector-wider review which examined the reasons for the high numbers of children in care and care applications, and developed ‘Options for change’.
- Leading the Knowledge Inquiry – ‘Cooperation of Coercion’ – into the use and misuse of section 20 voluntary arrangements. This Inquiry led to Family Rights Group’s first intervention in a Supreme Court matter – Williams -and- Hackney [2018] UKSC 37.
- Action research into the experiences of younger parents involved in the child welfare system.
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