Q: I run a successful small business but cannot yet commit to taking on any permanent staff. Instead I am looking at taking on a freelancer that I won’t have to pay if they don’t come up with the orders I need to grow the business. Can you provide some guidelines regarding terms of engagement?

From what you say it suggests your son’s intention was to use his frozen sperm to have a child with a partner if he felt so inclined and was left infertile after cancer treatment.

My car was a write-off. My insurers eventually paid out and I thought that was the end of it. Since then I have changed insurers. Last week I got a letter from a firm of Solicitors saying they had been engaged by my old Insurers to represent me and that I might have to go to Court. They also sent a list of their fees. I have phoned my current Insurers but they say my current legal cover is not applicable to a case prior to the date I started cover with them. What should I do?

Q)  My partner and I were due to visit our daughter just before Christmas, while she’s on her year abroad at university. Unfortunately our flight was cancelled on arrival at the airport; the cancellation was due to an unidentified object entering airport airspace and the airport having to temporarily close. Our daughter is in quite a remote area of southern France and there are only two flights a week to her nearest airport. We were unable to travel on the next flight due to my work commitments. Am I entitled to a refund or compensation?

Q: I am thinking about setting up a business with my brother. Whilst we get on, our wives sadly don’t. We are however planning to make our wives shareholders in the business, for financial reasons. Obviously setting up the business changes a lot of things in our lives and we will need to make new Wills to take these into account. If we leave our shares to our wives and something happens to one of us, the other one’s widow would effectively become a majority shareholder, which worries me.  Can we protect ourselves against this happening?

Q:  My husband and I chose to own our home jointly (as Joint Tenants) so that when one of us dies our half automatically goes to the other. However, when we chose to do that we did not have children. Now we do have children we would like to leave our half of the home to them rather than to each other. Is there any way we can change the way we own the property?

Q: When I married my husband I took on his two children as their mother had died some years earlier. I effectively became their mother and when my husband and I had two more children of our own, all four were treated and loved equally. The children are now all grown up and we are in our early seventies.

You will no doubt be surprised to learn that there is in fact no provision in law for Christmas contact arrangements. Even in cases where an absent parent has very little contact with a child, the unwritten rule is that Christmas holidays are split or shared between both parents.

Q. I am really struggling at work because I am a vegan and I feel my belief in this way of life is being undermined by my work colleagues who are constantly making fun of me. They claim they are just making jokes to tease me and I should ‘lighten up’. They cannot see that their ‘joking’ is hurtful and in fact is now making me ill.

Q:  I am 20 and I left home a year ago. When I occasionally bump into my dad he is nasty and threatening towards me. Can I get an injunction against him?