I would like to invite readers to meet a trusted and knowledgeable colleague, Joseph Shaub.  I am honored to have him share his wisdom and experience with you.  He is a collaborative family lawyer and mediator with offices in Seattle and Bellevue.  He is licensed as both an attorney and marriage and family therapist.  Joe has many more informative and helpful articles on a variety of topics in his website: www.josephshaub.com.  He has offered this informative article on the benefits of the collaborative law process.

CHOOSING COLLABORATIVE LAW

Divorce is such a hard road.  Sadly, lawyers can make that road so much harder.  They’re not bad people - most of them are truly lovely folks if you knew them socially.  However, their role is to protect their client.  “Protect them from what?” you might ask.  Well, protect them from being “ruined,” “screwed,” “wrecked” or “destroyed by their spouse,” if you asked them.  Lawyers, in their role as protectors are also dispensers of paranoia.  It’s part of the training.  It’s like a magical transformation, but rather than turning from an ugly duckling to a swan, or Clark Kent to Superman, the divorcing person enters the lawyers office wanting the “fair” outcome, not wanting to screw their spouse and emerges hyper-vigilant and hyper-protective of their “rights,” having heard for an hour or two what they are “entitled to.”

The good news is that there’s a large and growing group of lawyers in King County who want to help smooth the path of this otherwise rocky life transition.  They are “collaborative lawyers” and its important for anyone commencing this process to know about them.

Collaborative Law started in the early ‘90’s when a Minneapolis lawyer named Stu Webb decided he just wasn’t going to go to court any longer.  He asked all of his colleagues if any of them were willing to agree to forego the soul-rending process of divorce litigation and commit, with their clients, to working out all the details of a legal divorce by negotiated agreement.  He had a handful of takers… and the word got out.  Collaborative Law began to spread throughout the country.  To get an idea of its breadth and scope log onto the website of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals at www.collaborativepractice.com.

This form of healing, supportive practice - in which lawyers make a paradigm shift from protecting the narrow interests of their clients no matter who else may be hurt in the process (the spouse or their children) to developing a broader view of what a client’s real interests are - is now being practiced by many professionals in Washington.  The lawyers in King County Collaborative Law understand that an adversarial divorce which locks people into years of animosity and children into a life of negotiation between enemy camps simply can’t be in anybody’s interests.

Collaborative Law, as practiced in Washington is a “team approach,” recognizing that there are many elements of a divorce - the legal, the financial, the parental and the emotional.  So, we have collaboratively trained lawyers to support, advise and advocate for their clients; collaboratively trained financial specialists to act as neutrals, assisting the couples in understanding their current and future financial needs - and resources - in a non-adversarial manner; collaboratively trained mental health professionals, who act as divorce coaches, assisting people in managing the most acute emotional reactions that come up during the divorce process and child specialists who support the children through this alien and utterly unwelcome change in their lives.

While the collaborative law team approach is certainly more costly than doing it yourself, or working with a mediator, only, it is no more expensive than a conventional adversarial divorce where lawyers run into court to win temporary orders on behalf of their clients, stressful and incredibly comprehensive information gathering is conducted through a “discovery” process and a costly (both financially and emotionally) settlement conference is conducted where both people are separated with their lawyers and a settlement official shuttles between the two rooms with offers and counter offers in an effort to pound out a settlement in a day.  This process leads to next-morning regret for at least one person as sure as the sun rise in the east.  This doesn’t even include trial, which virtually guarantees destruction of whatever is left of the relationship between two people who shared years of intimacy and often children that they both love.

Collaborative practice can expose people embarking on this awesomely challenging life journey to a group of professionals who are committed to helping both people identify and achieve high-end goals that will serve them for the ensuing days, months and years.  An image evoked by one collaborative professional often is that of the divorced husband and wife sitting side-by-side (with their new partners if that be the case) at their children’s graduations or weddings and experiencing the gratitude of these children in finding a way to end the marriage (if end it must) in a loving, respectful manner, mindful of the integrity of everyone involved.

It’s a challenge, to-be-sure.  Yet a challenge well worth taking.

For more information visit the Collaborative Law page of Joseph Shaub’s website: www.josephshaub.com and the website of King County Collaborative Law, www.kingcountycollab.org.