What is Collaborative Divorce?

Collaborative Divorce is a process in which you and your spouse will each have your own specially trained and experienced Collaborative Divorce attorney and you both work through the issues of your case using a method known as “interest-based negotiation,” which enables spouses to formulate agreements that focus on their most important individual and mutual goals.

Benefits of Collaborative Divorce

It's Confidential

Collaborative Divorce is a private and confidential process. You and your spouse will have confidential conversations with your attorneys and create a strategy for accomplishing your goals in the case. In the Collaborative Divorce process those goals are reached without destroying your relationship with your spouse or exhausting your community resources in a court battle. Collaborative Divorce professionals manage this confidential process — in an office rather than a courtroom setting — that provides the resources, structure, and emotionally safe space needed for a divorcing couple to consider their unique situation and arrive at a mutually-agreeable settlement–outside the eye of the public.

It's Family Centered

The Collaborative Divorce approach is a settlement process that focuses on helping couples and their families find their way through the divorce process while creating an emotionally safe environment for the parties to voice their  goals and resolve their conflict without going to court.

The Collaborative Divorce process recognizes that, even though a marriage may be ending, relationships and obligations often continue, especially when children are involved. Collaborative Divorce helps minimize conflict so those co-parenting relationships are stronger moving forward, as opposed to the deep hurt to relationships that often is the outcome of a court battle. This process helps all family members learn how to move forward in a positive way – focused on the future, rather than dwelling on disputes of the past.

Children are at the very center of the Collaborative Divorce process. The goal is to achieve results that enable each person impacted by a divorce, especially children, to have the best post-divorce lives possible. Parents divorcing collaboratively are better able to protect their children from the damaging effects of a highly contentious divorce and are therefore better able to co-parent in the future.

It's as Unique as Your Family

Collaborative Divorce provides divorcing couples an alternative to a traditional courtroom divorce. In Collaborative Divorce, control isn't handed over to a judge unfamiliar with a couple's or a family's unique circumstances and who has a very limited time to hear their case. Instead, the divorcing couple works with specially trained Collaborative Divorce professionals, including mental health and financial professions, to arrive at a unique and customized solution, just for them, that will deliver the most positive outcome possible for the couple and the family.

It's Not in a Courtroom

Most couples agree that they would prefer to work through the issues of their divorce outside the courtroom. In the Collaborative Divorce process, clients sign a contract that they promise to try to settle all the issues of their case outside of court and that they even promise not to threaten to go to court. When that threat is removed, clients can more comfortably and satisfactorily negotiate the issues in their case.

It's Cost-Effective

Collaborative Divorce is a more cost-effective and efficient process than a traditional divorce. It is structured so that divorcing couples work with professionals to resolve financial, parenting, and other pertinent issues. It's a process that enables couples to invest directly in solutions rather than a costly court battle.

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