Dr Charlotte Proudman is a multi-award-winning barrister, academic and campaigner, recognised as one of the UK’s leading family lawyers and among the most prominent women’s rights advocates in the country. She was named Woman of the Year 2025 at the Women and Diversity in Law Awards.

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Renowned for her pioneering legal work on coercive control, domestic abuse and systemic reform, Charlotte has shaped how family courts understand and respond to gender-based violence. Her cases have set national precedents, defining gaslighting and coercive control as forms of domestic abuse; setting aside findings where victims did not have special measures; and challenging the use of victim stereotypes and rape myths in judicial reasoning.

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Photo: Lucy Young | The Times

She has been instructed in seminal cases ensuring children are recognised as victims in their own right and that women in refuges are protected by fair procedures for serving court orders. Her case also marked the first time intersectionality was defined in a family court judgment, a landmark ruling handed down on International Women’s Day.

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Charlotte’s representation of former MP Kate Kniveton shown on tv in Kate’s Story: Breaking the Silence (ITV1) secured landmark rulings on survivors’ rights to speak publicly about their experiences of abuse, changing public and legal discourse alike. Charlotte’s record of over 70 published judgments places her among the most cited family law advocates of her generation. ​​

Photo: Jooney Woodward 

Her highly acclaimed book, He Said, She Said: Truth, Trauma and the Struggle for Justice in Family Court (2025), exposes systemic misogyny within the family justice system and draws on her groundbreaking cases to reveal how survivors of abuse are silenced, disbelieved, and retraumatised by the very courts meant to protect them.

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Charlotte’s courtroom successes have been matched by her campaigning for institutional accountability, including her high-profile challenge to judicial membership of the Garrick Club, which led to multiple resignations and the Club’s decision to admit women, a turning point in legal culture.​​

As a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, Charlotte writes on gender inequality under the law, integrating academic insight into every aspect of her legal practice. She holds a doctorate in female genital mutilation law and policy from King's College, Cambridge, which was published as a book, FGM: When Law and Culture Clash, 2022 by Oxford University Press.

She is also the Founder of Right to Equality, the non-profit organisation that led the successful campaign to repeal the presumption of parental involvement in the Children Act 1989, a reform now recognised as one of the most significant protections for survivors of domestic abuse in recent decades. She continues to lead the national campaign for a Family Justice Bill to enshrine children’s safety and women’s rights in law.​​

Charlotte’s vision shapes every aspect of Proudmans. Drawing on her leadership in family law reform and landmark cases on private law children, domestic abuse, transparency, and financial remedies, she has built a firm that combines rigorous legal strategy with a commitment to systemic change. By uniting solicitors, barristers, and campaigners for change in one legal firm, Proudmans delivers representation informed by cutting-edge legal, academic, and policy insight. Each case is approached with precision, compassion, and purpose, ensuring that clients receive not only exceptional advocacy but also the benefit of a firm actively reshaping the standards and culture of family law.

Photo: Linda Nylind | The Guardian