The regulations governing discovery in an inter partes review (“IPR”) proceeding do not provide for the same methods of discovery available in a patent infringement lawsuit.

As such, when opportunities for discovery present themselves in an IPR proceeding, it is important to capitalize on them. Attorneys need to understand the differences between the discovery allowed in a federal lawsuit and the discovery allowed in an IPR proceeding. A key difference between these two proceedings is the role of a deposition.

All trial lawyers know the mechanics of a routine deposition: A long day in a conference room (or, these days, on a zoom call) where fact gathering is broken up by increments of “let’s take fifteen” for coffee, strategy discussions, and the like. Although depositions in an IPR proceeding have this same feel, IPR depositions can be very different from federal lawsuit depositions in terms of both scope and strategy.

In fact, aside from the general feel and format, there are not many other similarities. The nature of an IPR proceeding changes the “game” of a deposition. Depositions in an IPR proceeding function solely as a cross-examination and should not be viewed as an opportunity for traditional fact-gathering. To that end, the PTAB Rules limit the substance of these examinations to the scope of a witness’ direct testimony. This limitation can be somewhat of a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, the witness only needs to be prepared to opine on her direct testimony (generally, the contents of her declaration).

On the other hand, attorneys taking or defending an IPR deposition need to have a concrete understanding of what exactly falls “within the scope” of the witness’ direct testimony. Like many legal questions, the answer depends on the facts and circumstances of the case. However, in recent years the PTAB has provided a few guiding principles that the remainder of this article will address.

The PTAB has addressed what falls within the scope of cross-examination depositions in IPR proceedings on two somewhat recent occasions: First, in Google v. Cywee, the Board explained a general rule for ascertaining whether a line of questioning falls within the scope of the witness’ direct testimony. Second, in Reactive Surfaces v. Toyota Moter Corp., the Board addressed whether questions relating to asserted grounds of unpatentability were within the scope of a witness’ direct testimony.

Google v. Cywee: The general rule for determining whether a question is within the scope of direct testimony.

In Google, the PTAB settled a dispute amongst the parties concerning the scope of cross-examination in an IPR deposition. There, the petitioner offered to make its expert witness available for two of the generally required seven hours of questioning. The petitioner argued that its expert opined in his declaration on “a narrow issue that d[id] not warrant seven hours of cross examination.” Google, 2019 WL 3928855, at *2. The petitioner sought instructions from the Board to limit the time and scope of the cross-examination. Ultimately, the Board refused to limit the seven-hour time constraint set forth in its regulations and held that the patent owner’s proposed scope was “too broad” while the petitioner’s proposed scope was “too narrow.” Id. The Board held that “a question posed . . . is properly within [the] scope [of direct testimony] if it has sufficient underlying basis in a statement made by [the witness] in his Declaration.” Id.

The Board has not given much additional guidance on what kinds of questions may or may not have a “sufficient underlying basis” in the witness’ declaration to be considered within the scope. Such determinations depend on the specific facts and issues at play in each individual proceeding. This requires witnesses and lawyers on both sides to have extensive familiarity with the contents of the witness’ declaration to effectively navigate the Board’s standard for acceptable scope.

Reactive Surfaces v. Toyota Motor Corp: Are questions relating to asserted grounds of unpatentability within the scope of direct testimony?

In Reactive Surfaces, the PTAB addressed a similar dispute. There the patent owner sought to limit the deposition’s scope to “only the direct testimony about the asserted grounds of unpatentability on which [the Board] instituted trial.” Reactive Surfaces, 2017 WL 2390889, at *1 (emphasis added). Conversely, the petitioner argued that cross-examination should be allowed on all matters that the expert “offered direct testimony that [were] not irrelevant to the grounds of unpatentability on which [the Board] instituted trial.” Id. (emphasis added). The Board disagreed with both parties when holding that the patent owner’s proposed scope was too narrow and the petitioner’s proposed scope was too broad. Questions about the expert’s direct testimony concerning asserted grounds of unpatentability that the Board did not rely on to institute trial were not allowed. However, the Board limited its holding by reminding the parties that the Federal Rules of Evidence apply to IPR proceedings. As such, “to the extent that [the expert’s] testimony constitutes ‘a matter affecting his credibility,’ cross-examination of that testimony will be permitted, even if that testimony relates to asserted grounds of unpatentability on which [the Board] did not institute trial.” Id. (quoting Fed. R. Evid. 611(b)).

In Reactive Surfaces, the Board distinguished amongst testimony relating to asserted grounds of unpatentability. In a nutshell, questions regarding asserted grounds of unpatentability that the Board did not rely on when instituting the IPR are outside the scope of an IPR cross-examination deposition. Notably, if those questions relate to the witness’ credibility, they are an exception to this rule and fall within the scope. Otherwise, questions regarding testimony on asserted grounds of unpatentability that the Board did rely on to institute the IPR are fair game.

Conclusion

IPR depositions can be tricky. Ascertaining the deposition’s applicable scope is just one instance where parties must tread lightly. It is important for both sides to understand the applicable scope before the deposition takes place. Against this backdrop, parties navigating IPR depositions would be well-served to revisit the grounds upon which the Board instituted review as well as the witness’ declaration. The importance of thorough and strategic preparation cannot be understated for an IPR deposition. With effective preparation, lawyers can spot questions or topics that do not have “sufficient underlying basis in” the declaration to preserve their objections in a meaningful way.

One of the most often asked questions about equitable distribution of marital assets is how a retirement asset is divided between spouses. The answer depends largely on the type of retirement account being divided and what rules are associated with the retirement account.

All retirement accounts are not alike. The first question that must be asked is what type of retirement account are you dealing with? Generally, retirement plans are one of two types: a defined contribution plan or a defined benefit plan.

A defined contribution plan is a retirement plan in which the employee, or in the case of an IRA, the individual, contributes a set amount. An employer may match contributions up to a certain amount. The most well-known type of a defined contribution plan is a 401(k) plan. The employee typically has a portion of his or her paycheck deducted, which goes into the account. Many times, an employer will match a percentage of the deduction up to a cap. The deductions are pre-tax, meaning that the money comes out of the employee’s gross pay before taxes are withheld. The money is then taxed when the employee retires. The assumption is that the employee will be at a lower tax bracket at the time of retirement. The individual always knows how much is in the account and what the retirement is worth. For example, if after five years of employment the employee has contributed $30,000 and the employer has contributed $10,000, and the account has earned $400 in interest, the account value is $40,400.

A defined contribution plan that is divided in equitable distribution is distributed to each party via a transfer after a judgment of divorce is entered. In other words, if one spouse has $150,000 in a 401(k) account, after the divorce, there will be a transfer to the other spouse into an IRA or similar retirement account. So long as the transfer is into a similar account, the funds will not be taxed.

A defined contribution plan is a plan in which the actual amount will not be determined until retirement. The most common defined contribution plan is a pension. The employee contributes towards the pension during employment, and then when the employee retires, a benefit will be paid based on formula the employer uses, typically taking into account the number of years worked, and the final salary at the time of retirement.

Dividing a defined benefit plan is trickier than a defined contribution plan. The value of the benefit can be divided at the time of the divorce, or at the time the employee begins to receive the payments. To divide the benefit at the time of divorce, the present value of employee’s benefit which was accumulated during the marriage has to be determined. This is done by taking the known values, such as length of service and present salary, making assumptions of the employee’s age at which retirement is allowed under the plan, as well as assumptions of economic growth. The valuation is typically done by an actuary or other similar expert. The present value of an employee’s future pension is usually quite large and unless there are other marital assets which are liquid that can be offset, distribution usually has to wait until after the employee retires. This is known as a deferred distribution.

In order to divide a defined benefit plan after divorce, an order oftentimes known as a Qualified Domestic Relations Order will be signed by the court which directs the administrator of the retirement plan to pay a portion to the former spouse when the employee retires. The question that has to be asked is what is the appropriate portion. The only part of the benefit that a former spouse will be entitled to in equitable distribution is that portion that was earned during the time the parties were married. Yet the employee may have been working before the marriage, and may continue to work after the marriage is over. In order to get the right amount, a fraction is often used in which the top of the fraction is the part of the employment which occurred during the marriage, and the bottom of the fraction is the entire length of employment. This fraction is then multiplied by the percentage of the benefit the former spouse is entitled to typically 50%.

Another issue that should be addressed when dividing a defined benefit plan is survivor benefits. Most plans provide that the benefit stops on the death of the employee or participant, but may have an option that the employee may choose a survivor benefit which will allow a beneficiary to continue to receive benefits after the death of the participant. However, if the employee chooses this benefit, the amount of the benefit usually is less. Depending on the circumstances of the case, it is important to consider this issue when dividing a defines benefit plan.

In many divorces, retirement seems far away, and it is easy to pay less attention to issues that are not “front and center.” However, not giving these issues the attention they deserve can have disastrous consequences later on. Equally important is making sure your legal counsel us familiar with these issues.

The government is facing growing anger after voting against putting serial stalkers and domestic abusers on a national register, despite briefing they were likely to support the measures following the death of Sarah Everard.

Conservative MPs voted against amendments to the domestic abuse bill on Thursday that would have placed serial domestic abusers and stalkers on the current Violent and Sex Offender Register (Visor).

MPs also voted down House of Lords-supported amendments that would have given family court judges training on sexual abuse and provided greater protection to migrant victims of domestic violence.

The stalking amendment gained overwhelming support in the Lords last month and the home secretary, Priti Patel, suggested the government was likely to support the measures, telling MPs: “There is something about perpetrators and their serial offending that has to be addressed. There is no question about that at all … I will be very candid: we will look at all measures.”

After the death of Sarah Everard, government sources told the Sunday Times that the move also had the backing of the justice secretary, Robert Buckland, while a Change.org petition urging the government to introduce the stalkers’ register has attracted almost 250,000 signatures.

All but two Conservative MPs voted against the amendment to add persistent stalkers and domestic abusers to a national register. It was defeated 351 to 227.

Domestic abuse and stalking survivors and campaigners were disappointed and frustrated, said Sophie Francis-Cansfield, the senior campaigns and policy officer at Women’s Aid.

“Domestic abuse remains underreported and only a small proportion of survivors see criminal sanctions against their perpetrator – a register could have been a useful tool,” she said. “We have to find ways to proactively hold perpetrators to account and prioritise survivors’ safety.”

The domestic abuse campaigner David Challen, whose mother, Sally Challen, spent decades as a victim of her husband’s coercive and controlling behaviour, said the government was putting countless lives at risk by not creating a register to monitor abusers. “Abusers and stalkers commit a pattern of violent acts across multiple victims, this register was a vital opportunity to track and stop this violence,” he said.

The decision to exclude migrant women from protections offered under the new bill was “deeply troubling”, said Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters, which is taking part in a government pilot project to support migrant women and address an “evidence gap” around the need for support. “Copious evidence already exists,” she said. “The pilot is no substitute to the need for meaningful, long-term measures of protection for some of the most vulnerable women in our society. We will not be celebrating the bill when it becomes law because it is not a bill for all women.”

Jess Phillips, the shadow domestic violence minister, said the decision to vote against the amendments pointed to a government “hellbent on working with a clearly broken system that leaves violent criminals without management and has already left many women for dead”.

The decision to exclude migrant women from protections offered to other victims in the bill was “driven by ideology rather than reality”, she said, adding: “Foreign students, people working in our care system and across our country completely legally have been offered up a narrow system that will inevitably leave many with no choice but to return to violence and abuse.”

Lucy Hadley, the head of policy and campaigns at Women’s Aid, said it was “deeply disappointing” that the government had rejected the Lords’ amendments to give migrant women equal protection, adding that currently just 4% of refuges in England could accept a woman with no recourse to public funds due to immigration status. “All survivors must have the right to seek help and live a life free from abuse – regardless of their immigration status,” she said. “This law has been deemed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect all survivors, but there is much more to do.”

The government’s decision to vote down a requirement for all family court judges to have training on domestic abuse and sexual violence was “unbelievable”, said Dr Charlotte Proudman, an expert on gender-based violence and family law.

“I’m devastated,” she said. “The government’s harm report and three domestic abuse appeals show that the family courts are failing women and children leaving them in situations of harm.”

A government spokesperson said: “There has been no U-turn. The Lords amendment is not calling for a register, but instead changes to multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA).

“The government agrees that high-harm domestic abuse perpetrators need to be effectively monitored and supervised, which is why serial and high-harm domestic abuse offenders are eligible for management under MAPPA. Adding a new category of offenders automatically eligible for MAPPA risks adding complexity to those arrangements without any gain.”

 

…Maritime experts expect potentially complicated, lengthy litigation

 

 

Ben Eguzozie, in Port Harcourt

 

 

As earlier reported by Business A.M. on March 30 that various parties (cargo owners and their representatives, Ever Given vessel, Suez Canal operators, among others) would be up for a potentially complicated and lengthy international litigation, to recoup costs on the Suez Canal blockage, Egypt, canal owner which provided major ground support to free MV Ever Given from the canal waterway, has opened initial litigation against the Japanese shipowners, seeking compensation of $916 million from the vessel owners.

 

Maritime experts around the world say they expect a potentially complicated, and lengthy litigation with respect to MV Ever Given’s Suez Canal incident.

 

Ever Given, a skyscraper size vessel, with 220,000 tons of cargo, ran aground on the Suez Canal waterway, blocking the canal for almost a week last month.

 

An Egyptian court has impounded the vessel, asking the Taiwanese shipper, Evergreen Marine Corporation; flagged in Panama, to pay the amount to Suez Canal Authority (SCA) as cost it incurred in the canal handling.

 

Evergreen confirmed that it had been informed by the Japanese shipowners of M.V. Ever Given that the vessel “had been officially arrested by the Court in Egypt on 13 April.”

 

It said that in accordance with the information from the protection and indemnity insurer for the vessel, UK P&I Club, the shipowners had received a claim from the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) for US$916 million on 7 April, to cover losses during Ever Given’s grounding in the Suez Canal. The amount includes a US$300 million claim for “salvage bonus” and a US$300 million claim for “loss of reputation.”

 

Suez Canal, opened in 1869, today handles 12 per cent of the world trade and 30 per cent of global shipping volume. The CNN said the canal handles 5.2 million barrels of crude daily, and 3.2 million tons of cargo a day.

 

Experts said the canal handles $10 billion daily in global trade and supply chains, and since the blockage by the colossal container ship lasted about seven days – it follows that $70 billion was lost in the quagmire.

 

It is set to be an international legal process: the vessel is owned by a Japanese firm, Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd; operated by a Taiwanese shipper, flagged in Panama, and stuck in Egypt.

 

John Konrad, shipping expert at gcaptain.com, a shipping news provider, had said MV Ever Given is a “multinational conglomeration.”

 

SCA claims ‘lack detailed justification’

Evergreen, MV Ever Given’s operator has said, “SCA’s claims are largely unsupported and lack any detailed justification.” A meeting with it (Evergreen) and the SCA last week Tuesday had failed to yield any consensus, as the following day (Wednesday 13 April) SCA filed an application to ‘arrest’ the vessel, granted by the court.

 

Lloyd’s Loading List, the largest multimodal freight community, had reported as early as last month that Egypt was looking to claim around $1 billion in compensation for the casualty that closed the Suez Canal for six days in March.

 

According to the Financial Times, SCA head Osama Rabie had said last Monday that an investigation into the cause of the incident would finish on Thursday, but that the talks over compensation continued – noting that the ship’s owner was trying to reduce the bill by 90 per cent.

 

UK P&I had said last week Tuesday that a “carefully considered and generous” counter-offer had been made to the canal authority, adding that it was “disappointed by the SCA’s subsequent decision to arrest the vessel,” the FT reported.

 

Evergreen contended that it was doing “its utmost to complete the mission entrusted by its customers with all due dispatch; and to keep all adverse impacts to minimal level.”

 

The Taiwanese container is now urging all concerned parties to facilitate a settlement agreement to be reached, “in order to lift the arrest order (on Ever Given) as soon as possible.

 

On its own flank, Evergreen is investigating the scope of such a court order and studying the possibility of the vessel and the cargo on board being treated separately.

 

General average declaration by vessel owner

The vessel’s owner has declared ‘general average’ on the ship, with owners of uninsured cargo having to potentially wait for weeks or months to recover their consignment, cargo owners and their representatives with containers on MV Ever Given vessel are preparing for a potentially complicated and lengthy process to get freight released.

 

General Average is a legal principle of maritime law, and requires that all cargo owners on a vessel to contribute to the costs of any loss, even if their cargo is not damaged.

 

By far, the grounding of MV Ever Given by Egypt’s court is already shaping up as potentially the most complex ‘general average’ (GA) claim of all time, with litigation possibly involving 20,000 TEUs and up to 20 cargo interests per container, Lloyd’s Loading List had reported.

 

Ever Given’s Japanese shipowner Shoei Kisen had on 1 April declared ‘general average.’

 

But Avalon Risk Management, insurance specialist, highlighted that insurance can speed up the cargo release process by posting the General Average Guarantee to meet the cargo owner’s contribution and facilitate release of the cargo.

 

On the occasion a vessel owner declares General Average, appointed General Average adjusters will assess each shipment’s value on board and apply a formula that determines the financial contribution of each cargo owner. Cargo owners will then need to post a General Average guarantee.

 

Uninsured shippers’ nightmare

It would be a difficult matter for owners of uninsured cargoes onboard MV Ever Given. Under GA, insured customers will receive their cargo first, while uninsured shippers need the full costs to obtain release. One freight forwarding source said that in this instance, that cost is likely to be large and complex to work out – with the costs set to include claims from other parties which will delay claims adjustors assessing the level of costs incurred.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IN A MINUTE OR LESS

Any party to litigation in court or before an arbitral tribunal will, at some point, likely need to produce documents. Before producing documents that contain sensitive information (such as trade secrets or medical records), the producing party should ensure that a protective order is in place to prevent sensitive information from being made public or shared with a competitor. Parties generally have leeway to draft a tailored protective order that can be submitted for approval by the court or arbitral tribunal in which the parties stipulate to how confidential information within produced documents should be treated.

Here are three points to keep in mind when drafting a protective order:

Provide for the correct variety of confidentiality designations

Consider what designations should be available under your protective order and what each designation should mean. This requires you to consider early in the litigation what types of documents and information are likely to be relevant to the issues in the case. For example, in a case where an individual’s medical records are likely to be at issue, consider drafting a designation to cover Personally Identifying Information (PII) to prevent Social Security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, or similar information from becoming part of the public record. In a case where a business’s financial, budgetary, economic, or trade secrets may be produced, consider drafting a designation to cover Confidential Information, Business Confidential Information, or Highly Confidential Information; and where competitors are also a party to the litigation, consider drafting an Attorneys’ Eyes Only designation to limit the information that can be seen by a competitor. The protective order designations included, their definitions, and the protections they afford generally can be specifically negotiated and tailored to the particular needs of each case.

Consider what add-ins may be beneficial

Protective orders can cover more than when and how sensitive information can be designated. In most instances, it is beneficial to incorporate a “claw-back” or non-waiver provision in your protective order to minimize the risk of waiver in the event that privileged documents are produced inadvertently or otherwise. Particularly in cases involving large document productions, strong non-waiver provisions can head off an argument for subject-matter waiver when one otherwise privileged document is somehow not captured during your privilege review and is produced with thousands of non-privileged documents. For cases involving large amounts of electronically stored information (ESI), consider incorporating an ESI protocol directly into the protective order, or drafting a separate ESI protocol alongside the protective order to ensure that both parties produce ESI in usable formats with metadata intact. Additionally, with the proliferation of data privacy laws—such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union—consider whether any such laws may apply and, if so, whether the protective order should include provisions to accommodate any applicable data privacy laws.

Designate documents under a protective order to facilitate efficient compliance

Getting your protective order entered is just the beginning, since you will still need to appropriately designate any documents you produce. While it may be tempting to simply apply the text of the designation to the face of the document or render it on the image of a document, consider also adding any designations in the file name, particularly for documents that are produced in a native format such as Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. Where you are producing documents in imaged format with an associated load file, be sure to include a Protective Order Designation  (POD) field that is specific to the applicable protective order designation for your case. When this field is appropriately populated, it streamlines database queries later in the case and makes quick work of finding documents that have been designated. This is particularly helpful when you are working to identify only the subset of production documents that your client is eligible to see, and, at the case’s conclusion, when you are required to certify that all documents designated under the protective order have been deleted.

What a year. I mean, really, where to begin? I’ve separated from my husband, for starters, plus I no longer wear heels higher than 0.5cm (the two are unrelated, I believe). I’ve been dying my grey roots using a weird mix of reds and gingers purchased at Superdrug throughout lockdown. Newly separated with badly dyed hair? Not exactly what I had in mind for my 47th birthday…

It wasn’t always this way. I worked at Elle magazine in the Noughties, prior to which I was just plain naughty (see the whole of the 1990s for details). I’ve travelled the world, interviewing countless celebrities and fashion designers, sometimes ending up in, shall we say, “interesting” scenarios with the kind of people you don’t talk about in the press without legal representation. But after 15 years of high jinks and dance floors, I wanted what lots of people crave when they hit their mid-thirties. As late nights began to lose their sparkle and the thrill of boarding a plane for 24 hours to interview my latest fashion crush wore off, I wanted a family. I wanted to get married.

A decade on, as I navigate life after marriage, this new column is a real-time diary of what’s going on in my life. I won’t mention my ex here, but I will say this: I once loved him so very much and it’s hard to fathom how I got to where I am today, aka in a bit of a pickle. As in, I’ve moved out of a house that’s been my home for a decade, because that’s what we both agreed. It was awful leaving my home, but I wanted a fresh start. We’ve agreed on fifty-fifty custody of our two lovely children. I had to leave my ancient dog behind because I couldn’t take him to a rented house, and I left shoes, books and piles of personal things I couldn’t bear to pack into storage boxes. I left behind part of my soul and it’s still so painful. When my life began tumbling down like dominoes set up on a wonky table, no one could have prepared me for the aching loneliness and gnawing grief that lay ahead. When I lie awake at 2am, there’s one sentence I see hovering above my head like Snoopy: “Stacey, how the hell did you manage to blow up your life so badly?”

What a year it’s been for all of us – and what a year to set up a new home alone. Add home-schooling and working full-time to the mix and, oh boy, what a s—storm. That’s where I found myself in the summer of 2020. After a long time spent sleeping in the spare room of our family home, I decided it was time to move things on. I took a rental property mid-pandemic, having only viewed it via a video call with an estate agent I should have known better to trust. It looked nice enough, well, if you believed the 15-year-old pictures on the agent’s website and find Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a “fluffy” read. In reality, the bathroom tiles were dangerously cracked, the oven looked like it had been used in one of the crack-den scenes in Breaking Bad, and as for the carpet in my daughter’s new bedroom, let’s not go there – ripped, damp, horrendous.

A rationally thinking person might have turned to the estate agent and said: “We are done here, please refund my rent and deposit immediately.” Instead, I allowed myself to believe his too-wide smile, as he ushered me through the gates of hell otherwise known as the door to my new “home”. And so instead of handing back the keys, I entered into an unhealthy, mildly co-dependent relationship with my landlord, a woman living in Yorkshire. I remodelled her kitchen and then her bathroom. I oversaw builders and continued to pay rent, albeit reduced. (Of course I did – I’d lost my mind!) All semblance of control of my life slipping through my fingers, I had no choice but to return to the spare bedroom of my family home. Lying in bed with my ancient dog, surrounded by half-packed boxes, I pondered ordering a s–t sandwich from Deliveroo.

I finally moved into the Breaking Bad rental last September, after overseeing the landlord’s shoddy builders for several weeks. During the eight weeks that followed, I couldn’t eat or sleep and used every ounce of energy to parent and keep the job that was paying my rent. One day, during a particularly bad episode, I had to do a piece to camera for a film, talking about sustainability and fashion. Wearing a see-through protective visor, I remember the room felt suddenly too warm and with no food in my belly and unable to drink water for fear of gagging, I assumed this might be the moment I’d die. Channelling Paloma Picasso in the 1980s with a dash of Eddy from Ab Fab, I remember thinking, head dizzy, people blurring around me, “I’m going to have to call 999.” Glancing down at myself – smart blazer, black tailored trousers, huge heels, a massive gold necklace – I realised if there were ever a time to be rushed to hospital in an ambulance, this would be a great outfit to do it in.

The grief of my marriage ending gripped me so hard, I found it difficult to believe the pain would ever end. But eventually, a few months ago, things started to shift when I moved house again. I started running again; I started eating and sleeping again. And as we all began to feel more settled in our new lives, I started to notice a gentle flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel has been long and winding and there’s still so much of it left to climb through, but I knew I’d turned a corner the other week, when a friend showed me the dating app she’d just downloaded. A date? What might it be like to go on a date, I pondered? I haven’t been on one of those for over a decade and, anyway, it hasn’t exactly been possible during lockdown. (I couldn’t imagine walking around a park with a hip flask full of wine, chatting with a total stranger, hair sticking to lipstick in the wind.) But with the fresh shoots of optimism tickling at my toes (eg the pubs are open), perhaps it’s worth giving the dating thing a go?

And that’s where this diary begins. Dating post-marriage – including what to wear (more on that below), because who talks about that? I may climb inside my wardrobe and scream if I read another working from home fashion edit or anything involving dressing from the waist up and jogging pants. I’m ready for a heel higher than 0.5cm and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no point in saving clothes for best. Wear a gown during the day? Tick, been there this past lockdown. Beauty-wise, well, I have some tricks to share. As for fitness, there’s fruit in cocktails, so that’s that covered.

I don’t know about you, but I plan to embrace the second half of my life with the kind of high-level enthusiasm you might find on centre court during the finals. As for where that takes me? You’ll be the first to know – because you’re coming with me. So, buckle up, it’s going to be quite a ride, and there may be a few crashes along the way. Which is totally fine, given I’ve just discovered Gucci sell crash helmets…

Here’s what else is on my mind… 

Saggy neck? A shot of hyaluronic acid could be the answer

A woman says she divorced her husband after she claims he told “the most ridiculous lie I’ve ever heard” when she confronted him with a photo from a nightclub photographer.

TikTok user Tylar Paige uploaded a series of videos, which have racked up more than 2.2 million views, as she explained that she spotted her partner in photos “with a bunch of girls” on the venue’s Facebook page.

The man posed for the picture holding a shot in one hand and a bottle in the other – but it’s what was missing from his hand that was spotted by his wife.

Tylar says: “He’s not wearing his wedding ring. So I ask him about it. He tells me that they Photoshopped his ring off.

“They Photoshopped his ring off!? Oh, sure they did. We’re divorced.”

As viewers demanded to know more about what happened, she added: “So after realising he was married to a Photoshop expert, and no nightclub photographer is going to take all that time to Photoshop his ring off, he changes his story.

“He tells me that he must have taken his ring off when he washed his hands, and forgot to put it back on. Huh, what a convenient time to forget to put your ring back on.”

When she noticed his cousin also didn’t appear to be wearing his ring, she claims he only made matters worse by saying you couldn’t see it in the dim lighting because it is black, only to see him later and spot that it was silver.

The videos racked up hundreds of comments, as people joked the nightclub had probably photoshopped him into the venue, and another added: “The girls were CGI too.”

Others shared their own similar experiences, as one wrote: “Oh my ex husband’s ring fell off in his Instagram stories from work but somehow he found it and put it back on every day before he walked in the door.”

And someone else said: “My ex was on a dating site… his excuse was it was an old profile and dating sites make the accounts of hot people look active to get more people.”