I speak for myself, but I have read a great deal of what other practitioners have to say and have sat in numerous seminars that examine collaborative practice. Please read my profile. If you want to know why I think Collaborative Law works, read on.
Dissolutions of marriage (divorce) are the cases I handle most often. We have a political (budget) problem. A smart person said: The law is "extraordinarily complex, the stakes in family law cases are high, and the court system has failed to allocate sufficient resources to keep caseloads realistic. Despite the importance, complexity and volume, family law departments don't have the clout to get the appropriate share of the court budgets." (Leslie E. Shear)
So, we look for solutions outside the court system. We want the solutions to be fair. Those of us who were trained to be lawyers in the seventies were not given tools that can reliably result in fairness in all cases. Some attorneys trained in later years were trained to mediate issues as well as litigate, but still, that whole process has still been squeezed to fit within the traditional system.
Some of us have trained and continue to train in Collaborative Law because we see that the traditional system fails our clients. The adversarial process often exacerbates the injury a divorcing person feels.
The issues are: how to share time to parent the child(ren), how to provide financial support for children and for spouse, how to account for and divide assets and debts, including the costs of litigation. These are the issues I was taught were all the issues that mattered in a divorce case. When we go to court, these are the only categories of issues that matter. How a spouse feels, about fairness or otherwise, is irrelevant.
A court of appeals once said dissolution of marriage "is, in the mathematical sense, a negative-sum game where each party will not have the same access to the whole of the marital property he or she had during the marriage."
"Things are not always as complicated as they are made to be." (Kathryn M. Fitzgerald) That is, when things can go simply, they sometimes take a more difficult path. Issues in divorce and other cases often blow up because of outside pressure. But, they can also be contained, if we look for creative ways to solve problems.
The children were fighting over the last orange; each wanted it. They had been brought up to understand compromise, so the elder carefully sliced the fruit in half. The younger ran outdoors, turned the peel inside out and greedily sucked out the juice and ate up the pulp. He tossed the peel in the garbage. His older sister, meanwhile, pared the zest from her half and used it in the orange icing she was making for a cake. She did not need the pulp or the juice, so she put that in the kitchen waste. If only they had each known what the other wanted, each could have gotten 100%.
Ask yourself, do we have a stake in the outcome such that we can work together toward solutions? If your answer is yes, the Collaborative process will work.
President Barack Obama is the person the United States elected as our representative because of his extraordinary ability to speak about empathy and understanding. He wrote: "...another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country's founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."
by Kathryn M. Fitzgerald, CFLS (Certified by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization as a Family Law Specialist, since 1994.)
