It's having a lawyer in your corner in a divorce situation, with the understanding that he/she is there to support you and work with you in settling the divorce issues, but with the further understanding that the lawyer will not participate in contested court proceedings.
The bottom line in divorce work is finding a way for the parties to reach agreement on all relevant issues.
To make it easier to accomplish that, in collaborative law the parties and their attorneys work toward getting agreement before either party has been served with divorce papers, rather than involving the courts at the same time the parties are trying to get agreement, which is the traditional way.
Unfortunately that is often the reality in traditional divorce proceedings. So in the collaborative law approach, the lawyers and their clients have to learn to act differently--to leave their anger and resentments at the door and come to the arena with at least some spirit of good will and motivation to work things out. Collaborative lawyers have to ask: "How can we help these people arrive at a fair settlement and get on with their lives?"
What each of the parties has in the way of assets and income is determined using an informal "trust and verify" approach, rather than engaging in expensive legal procedures to get this information. The parties are asked to disclose this information voluntarily and to verify it with documentation and tax returns.
The usual way of communicating is in the form of 4-way conferences--the parties and their collaborative lawyers sit around a table and discuss the issues and seek ways to get agreement. The issue being worked on is figuratively put in the center of the table, and the participants focus on ways to resolve it--rather than seeing the other party as the problem and attacking him or her.
In most cases it works wonderfully well. In the typical adversarial divorce practice, the attorney often resists the idea of getting the parties together when there are problems. Instead, they bring motions to have the Court solve the problems. Now when a problem comes up a collaborative lawyer's first thought is "We've got to get together and solve this!"
The collaborative lawyers play an important role in "setting a tone" of positive energy in the conference room--keeping a good energy with everyone monitoring it to the best of their abilities. A clean energy results in good decisions, a negative energy creates a climate for tension and dissent. Collaborative lawyers also perform a valuable function here in "modeling" appropriate behavior, rather than picking up on and magnifying negative client emotional response.
The next step is for one of the parties' lawyers to draft legal documents to convert their informal agreements into legally binding ones which are then submitted to the Court for approval usually without any Court hearing.
If the parties cannot reach settlement with the help of their collaborative lawyers, there may be an exploration of whether they may want to try an alternative way to resolve their matter, for example, mediation, neutral experts, or arbitration. If not, then their collaborative lawyers would withdraw and the parties would proceed to obtain attorneys to prepare the matter for trial.
Out of context it does seem duplicative. In context, we lawyers, by training and instinct, are trial and Court oriented. Even though a lawyer might say he/she tries to settle all their cases, they tend to drift to Court proceedings. Once in court, the time and costs--and stress--escalate. This was the situation which created the impetus for Collaborative Law. The collaborative lawyer by definition cannot in that case go to adversarial court proceedings. He or she then is forced to become a settlement specialist. The trial lawyer is a trial specialist. The parties who have had to engage collaborative lawyers for settlement and trial lawyers for trial have, at least, had the best of both approaches.
Any person approaching a divorce situation should talk with a collaborative lawyer to get an assessment of his or her situation with respect to the prognosis for settlement. The earlier this is done the better the chance for the party to be oriented toward a settlement approach, The party and his/her attorney can then strategize on how to enroll the spouse in a settlement approach.
If settlement is the aim then a collaborative lawyer can be a coach to guide you through that process or any other alternate dispute resolution approach, such as meditation. No matter what settlement approach is chosen, a collaborative lawyer can be a valuable ally.
Collaborative law is a "home grown" Minnesota process. It was started in 1990 in the Twin Cities' area with an initial group of four family-law lawyers. Since then, a nonprofit corporation, the "Collaborative Law Institute, was formed as an umbrella organization to provide training, education, development and promotion of Collaborative Law. At the present there are nearly 40 family-law practitioners as members of the Institute. For a list of the members contact the Institute at (612) 566-8800. Several Collaborative groups are now active in the San Francisco Bay area and groups are forming in New Hampshire, Ohio and Georgia.
Collaborative law is a simple concept. Collaborative law is a profound concept. That's the best kind of concept: simple and profound. Collaborative Law is alive and well in Minnesota.