Create an Alternative Future
Collaborative Law provides you, as a divorcing client, with a client-centered process option for resolving the problems stemming from the breakdown of your marital relationship. The Collaborative setting provides a safe place for you to take personal responsibility for finding creative solutions which fit your own, and your children’s, needs, interests and goals. This process is far preferable to handing off these most personal concerns to lawyers and judges.
Litigation is an adversarial process; by definition, it is a problem looking for a place to happen.That place is a public courtroom, where the judge won’t care about your children; he or she has her own problems to worry about.
Collaboration offers you a chance to work together with informed professionals to solve your problems on your own terms. Collaborative Law is about working together, as opposed to against one another, and it applies to you, the client, as well as the two lawyers in the case.
You all collaborate to find creative solutions and create an alternative future.
The centerpiece of the Collaborative Process is the Collaborative Participation Agreement. By this contract, both attorneys limit the scope of their representation to the Collaborative Process. The clients will have determined that it is not in their best interest to “take up arms against one another.” This means that, from the moment the contract is signed, neither lawyer will be permitted to represent either client in any litigation involving your family.
At a time when events and circumstances seem to be spiraling out of control, the Collaborative Process, with its Participation Agreement, provides an opportunity for divorcing couples to make a choice to keep control over potential outcomes which will surely affect the rest of their lives and the lives of their children. Each party will have expert legal advice and counsel geared only towards finding acceptable solutions and not at all concerned with doing damage to anyone.
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My dedication to the process
After thirty years of legal practice, I have now restricted my work to Collaborative Law and Mediation because of the reasons discussed here. I have personally witnessed what divorce litigation too often brings: the destruction of parent-child relationships, the hatred, the animosity, the regret, the pain and the shamefulness involved in such situations; not to mention the wasting of time, energy and money. I have come to the conclusion that traditional family law litigation is antithetical to families in need of healthy transition.