Collaborative Divorce: Your Path to a  Peaceful Divorce Settlement

Collaborative Practice combines the ability to create agreements tailored to your family with the support of a team of dedicated, highly knowledgeable professionals. This gives you control over the outcome, while ensuring that you have a collaborative attorney on your side to guide you through the process. A Collaborative Divorce is a structured, out-of-court process designed to help you reach a family law settlement in a supportive, transparent environment. Although both spouses or partners have attorneys, you work together as a team to generate and evaluate options, ultimately creating the agreement that works best for your family.

Like mediation, Collaborative Practice is particularly well suited for LGBTQ, non-monogamous, and neurodivergent families. When you work with a collaborative attorney, you have the space and time to give your team the full context of what’s relevant to your family. This is especially helpful for families with trans or neurodivergent children who might need a very tailored parenting plan.
Collaborative Practice is often used in the context of divorce, but it can be applied to other family law agreements, such as prenuptial agreements or post-nuptial agreements and cohabitation agreements.

1. The Collaborative Team

A full Collaborative Practice team consists of at least five professionals. Each spouse or partner retains a collaboratively trained attorney and a divorce coach (a licensed mental health professional). The team also includes a neutral financial specialist, to assist the parties with asset disclosure and division, as well as a neutral child specialist (if there are minor children).

Whether you need a full team may depend on your personal circumstances, including how well you and your spouse can communicate, your financial situation, and whether you have children. If you’re interested in collaborative practice but not sure about working with a full team, you can email me or schedule a free consultation to talk in more detail about what path might be right for you.

2. The Disqualification Clause and the No-Court Pledge

What makes Collaborative Divorce unique? The parties sign a disqualification clause and no-court pledge at the beginning of the process. The parties agree to commit to the collaborative process to resolve their divorce — they will not file litigation paperwork while the Collaborative Divorce is proceeding. If one or both parties decide not to continue with the Collaborative Process, the professionals on the team are disqualified from continuing to work with the parties in any capacity. This helps incentivize the parties to stick with the process, even when it gets rough.

3. Interest Based Negotiation

In the Collaborative Process, the professional team helps the parties negotiate from an interest-based framework rather than engaging in positional bargaining. Positional bargaining is the kind of negotiation most people think of when they imagine a divorce. “You want $700 a month in support? I can only offer $500.” With positional bargaining, the parties can reach an impasse quickly, as a win for one person almost always means a loss for the other.

With interest based negotiation, the parties start with their underlying needs. “I want to stay in the house until the kids graduate high school, to minimize the disruption in their lives, but I won’t have enough money to make the mortgage on my own.” Starting with the underlying needs creates space for the parties to come up with creative solutions that feel like a win for both.

4. Role Specific Support

Collaborative Practice works best when the professional team puts the right professionals in the room with the parties at the right time. Not all meetings require a full team. The parties may be able to work with only the neutral financial professional to create their disclosures and discuss options for dividing assets. Similarly, a child specialist can work with the parties on a parenting plan with minimal involvement from the attorneys.

5. Key Differences between Collaborative Divorce and Litigation

Complete control: In Collaborative Divorce, the parties retain total control over the agreements made and the timing of negotiations, whereas in litigation, the judge controls both the decision and the timing of the case.

Privacy: When you litigate in court, hearings become a matter of public record. In contrast, in a collaborative process, the discussions, negotiations, drafts, and conversations you have with the professional team are all privileged and/or confidential.

Cost Effective: Collaborative Divorce, while more expensive than mediation, is often much less expensive than a fully litigated divorce case. The ability of the professional team to assign the right professional to the right task (for example, utilizing the coaches for communication), is often much more cost effective than each client paying an individual attorney to argue the same points.

Wondering if the Collaborative Process is right for you? Schedule a virtual consultation, email me, or read the Collaborative Divorce FAQs