By Bev Clarke
These are the top ten points you need to know when thinking about the Collaborative Process for your divorce. If you think you can work within this arrangement then Collaborative could be for you.
1. All parties participate in an open, honest exchange of information.
2. Neither party make take advantage of any miscalculation or mistake of the other but instead all parties are directing their energy toward identifying and correcting any miscalculation or mistakes.
3. Parties insulate their children from their dispute and should children’s issues become an issue, both parties work toward promoting the children’s interests as paramount in the process of resolving the issue.
4. The parties can use joint accountants, valuers, psychologists and social workers, appraisers and other consultants.
5. A respectful, creative effort to meet the legitimate needs of both parties replaces tactical bargaining backed by threats of litigation.
6. Collaborative Lawyers act as guides in the process to settlement and are committed to assisting the parties to reach settlement. Both lawyers are prevented from proceeding to the Court in the event that settlement fails.
7. In Collaborative Law there can be a parity of payment to each lawyer so that neither parties representation is disadvantaged by lack of funds, which otherwise is a frequent problem in adversarial litigation.
8. Negotiations proceed by exploring each parties interests rather than positional bargaining.
9. The parties retain control of the process and any issues that they wish to have aired are appropriately aired. In an adversarial process, many issues are left to fester long after the process is over. Many issues are never dealt with or raised in the proceedings as they may well be considered by a Court to be irrelevant or of no evidentiary value.
10. In an adversarial process there is less option for creativity in finding a solution to a problem because lawyers are more generally confined to looking at solutions that accord with what a Court would do rather than a more creative solution that may be preferable to the parties.
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