One Divorce Lawyer’s Experience
December 10, 2009
I would like to share with you some of my personal experiences in the practice of Collaborative Family Law, a/k/a Collaborative Divorce, during the last nine years. As you are aware, I litigated contested divorces and parenting disputes for over 30 years – until I learned of and took the special training for Collaborative Family Law (CFL). By 2000 I became convinced that the non-adversarial CFL process is a far superior process for terminating a marriage than the traditional adversarial process through normal litigation in Domestic Relations Court. Consequently, since 2000 I have limited my practice to Collaborative Divorce, Early Neutral Evaluation and Family Mediation. I have not represented a party to a litigated matter during the last nine years – and I have been delighted with the results, both personally and professionally. CFL has liberated me from all of the artificial posturing and gamesmanship (and headaches) normally encountered in family law litigation, and I have been able to help clients solve their family restructuring problems in some very creative ways that would never have been accomplished through normal litigation, including a good number of high asset and income cases. My experience has been that 90% of all couples who go through the CFL process appreciate greatly the fact that both parties are able to maintain their personal dignity and have more control over the custom design of both financial and parenting arrangements that come as close as possible to meeting the future needs and goals of both parties and their children. In addition, the CFL process saves both parties enormous amounts of time and money compared to normal litigation. RW.