Seattle Divorce Attorneys, Collaborative Divorce Lawyers, Seattle, Washington, WA

You Can Choose a Better Divorce
Almost every divorce starts out with parties having very different views. We help divorcing and separating clients resolve disputes so they can move forward. We can help you reach agreements in your divorce and separation in a respectful and cost-effective manner, where you and your spouse make the decisions about your future and your children's future. You can probably make better decisions for yourself and your children than any stranger could. Why not make those decisions yourself based on the factors that are important to you? Yet, reaching common ground that meets the needs of all can be challenging without professional facilitation, guidance, assistance, and education. Our focus is to help by providing highly qualified facilitation, guidance, and assistance to help you to reach consensus in your divorce so you can move forward in your life.

Choose a Divorce That Is Consistent with Your Values and Priorities
When you and your spouse reach resolutions that best suit your values, goals, and needs, the resolutions are not just better but also tend to be more durable. We help people like you reach divorce resolutions by listening carefully and helping them identify what is most important to them. We then help our clients create a reality-based divorce settlement that is in alignment with their own priorities, goals, and needs. The Collaborative Divorce process and facilitative divorce mediation are the only processes that are specifically designed to consistently help clients reach that level of divorce resolution. When the needs of divorced parents and children are addressed in a manner that is respectful and preserves everyone's dignity, they are usually also better able to co-parent their children together.

Realities of Old-Style Divorce

Hiring divorce lawyers for a conventional old-style divorce, which may involve the court (or arbitrator) to various degrees, is an option that might be most appropriate for you. It also has disadvantages. Here are some realities about that option:

The court is far from ideal for the task of restructuring your family after a divorce. Most judges and divorce lawyers lack training in family systems or child development
In a court divorce, a judge makes life-altering decisions for you ... and may get it wrong. The judge does not have to live with the mistakes.
Court divorce proceedings are usually extremely expensive (more than you would likely imagine), and the legal fees are often significantly underestimated.
A court divorce inevitably exacts an emotional toll for all involved.
In a court divorce, intimate details of your finances and other matters become a public record, often permanently available to anyone.
Court fights cannot help divorcing spouses co-parent after the attempt to "win" is over. Nor can they make you feel better in the long-run.
The legal maneuverings and positioning that precede the settlement can easily cause unnecessary pain and resentment, contributing to future problems and even a seemingly endless series of legal battles.
The court requires that significant attention be paid to procedural details, legal technicalities, and arbitrary timelines, all of which take time, cost money, and can interfere with solving problems.
No one really wins either in a court divorce, or by the use of the power tactics that are commonly used to reach conventional settlements. The court is structured as an adversarial system, where the "truth" is supposedly in-between two extremes. The court makes decisions based on arguments made by divorce lawyers, who generally argue to "win" something that cannot be winnable.

What to expect in your divorce? Read more about divorce and family law.

There Are Alternatives to an Old-Style Divorce and Old-Style Divorce Lawyers
Instead of the old-style way of having a stranger make what may be some of the most important decisions in your life, divorcing and separating couples have the option of making their own divorce decisions. There are many alternatives and you can choose the one that fits you. When supported by divorce lawyers and other professionals who are trained in non-court methods of arriving at divorce settlements, couples can often get a divorce that better preserves relationships, dignity, and privacy. By resolving the conflict and addressing some of the pain that is inherent in divorce, each spouse can move forward with his or her life. This can be done through the Collaborative Divorce process and divorce mediation with the assistance of divorce lawyers and professionals who focus exclusively on helping couples in conflict come to agreement. We do not view our lawyer's job as going to court to try to “win” a divorce, because all too often even the “winner” loses -- along with everyone else.

Educating Yourself About Divorce

1. Explore this site to learn as much as you can about divorce, available divorce process options, and working with divorce lawyers. Learn about all Divorce Options available to you, so you can make the best choice for yourself.

2. Call to make an appointment for a consultation, so you can:

Explore what may be most important for you in your post-divorce future.
Understand the different divorce options and evaluate which one(s) may be best for your unique situation.
Identify the factors that will help you determine whether a Collaborative Divorce, divorce mediation, or another divorce process is best for your unique circumstances.
Plan what's next based on what is most suitable for you.

3. Learn about Selecting Divorce Lawyers.

How to schedule an appointment? Read More

A Divorce Settlement Can Help Protect Your Privacy
Collaborative Law and mediation in divorce are especially well suited for protecting privacy. Instead of placing personal information in a public court record, negotiations in Collaborative Divorce and divorce mediation are private and confidential. Unlike a court decision, many of the details of your divorce settlement may even remain confidential by placing them in a contract that can stay private. In the Collaborative Law divorce process, everyone signs an agreement at the start that the divorce discussions and proceedings will remain confidential and that the lawyers' only role can be to focus on settlement. No other divorce process offers that degree of privacy protection that applies to all professionals as an inherent part of the structure from the beginning to end. Similarly, in divorce mediation, everyone signs an agreement that the divorce negotiations will remain confidential.

A Divorce Resolution Is Better for Children
By helping divorcing parents preserve a working relationship, Collaborative Divorce allows parents to reach better solutions for their children and to build a new and better co-parenting relationship for their future. In our experience, parents rarely work better together after a child custody or visitation fight in court, and the children are often victims of a court battle in their parents' divorce. We all know that children learn from their parents, including lessons drawn from how they observe their parents handling their divorce or separation. Collaborative Divorce is family-focused divorce, and allows the opportunity for parents to work together to build a healthy and cooperative parenting partnership and to model for their children how to best resolve conflict.

Divorce Court Has Limits in Its Ability to Restructure Families
Most divorce lawyers and judges will tell you that courts are far from ideal for the task of restructuring families. In divorce court, intimate details of a couple's finances and other matters are presented to a judge or court commissioner who makes life-altering decisions based on the law as guided by arguments made by the divorce lawyers and a limited amount of evidence that lawyers may present under court rules and laws. Even when the divorce laws provides clear guidance (often the law does not), the law may not be a good fit for your family's unique circumstances. Divorce court proceedings are often very expensive, the outcome is often uncertain and unpredictable, and the emotional toll can be great. Often, no one wins. A court fight (even on a motion for a temporary parenting plan (custody and visitation), alimony/spousal maintenance or child support) usually does not make divorcing spouses better able to co-parent after the court fight is over. Even when there is a divorce settlement after bartering-style negotiations, the legal maneuverings and positioning that preceded the settlement can often cause unnecessary pain and resentment and contribute to future problems. While the court provides a necessary service when needed, it is best to avoid court involvement in your divorce if possible.