What is Collaborative Divorce?

A team of specialists in your corner.

The collaborative divorce process starts when both parties hire a collaboratively trained attorney.

The pain, anger, frustration and other highly charged emotions typical to divorce often impede the ability to communicate. When communication breaks down, progress becomes impossible. In addition to your attorneys, your collaborative team includes a mental health professional.

Your coach provides neutral emotional guidance, fosters more effective communication, and supports both parties in the process of working through the thorny emotional issues and hot-spots surrounding money and children.

Unraveling the family finances is also often complicated. Your collaborative team includes a neutral financial advisor to assist in the financial planning and evaluation of ideas for distribution of marital assets. A collaboratively trained financial expert provides invaluable insight into creative ways to expand the financial pie and navigate towards financially sound and responsible solutions tailored to the unique needs of both parties.

Collaborative divorce is particularly beneficial in situations involving a family-owned business. A forensic accountant joins the team and performs valuations in a completely streamlined, private and confidential setting.

Together, everyone on the collaborative divorce team helps guide spouses towards a respectful, mutually beneficial and non-litigious transition into a separate life.

How it works.

Once we assemble your team, everyone signs a participation agreement, wherein the participants agree NOT TO LITIGATE.  This contract is a written commitment to practice good faith and fair-mindedness and to be transparent with all documentation regarding assets, income, and debt.

By signing the agreement, you reserve the right to litigate in the future, but not in the context of the collaborative divorce process. If one or both parties wish to commence litigation after the collaborative process begins, we discharge all collaborative team members and end the process.

Eliminating the threat of litigation from the outset removes pressure and fear, and engenders an atmosphere of trust. Removing fear from the landscape makes space for open communication and creative problem solving.

Collaborative divorce aligns the interests of both parties from the outset, including the mutual desire to maintain dignity, privacy, and autonomy in a completely transparent process of crafting a more positive future with the help of a specially trained team of professionals.

Your teammates work with you and your spouse, as well as each other, towards the common goal of transforming and restructuring your family in the best way possible. Your attorneys provide you with zealous advocacy in a non-adversarial manner.

You are both empowered with a clear vision of your new financial and parental roles, and relationship to one another. You emerge from the process with a solid foundation for a new and healthy bi-nuclear family.

“It is better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, war, war.” 

-Winston Churchill