Divorce Attorneys, Child Support Mediation Lawyers Seattle WA

Choose a More Respectful Divorce

We help divorcing and separating clients resolve disputes so they can move forward. We help our clients reach agreements in their divorce or separation in a respectful manner. Reaching common ground can be challenging without professional assistance. Collaborative divorce attorney and mediator J. Mark Weiss provides the assistance needed to help you reach a consensual agreement. You can choose to make your own decisions in your divorce instead of having someone else make those decisions for you.

Divorce Court Has Limits in Its Ability to Restructure Families
In divorce court, too often everyone loses—even the “winner.” Courts are simply not well-suited to restructuring families. Court proceedings perpetuate power struggles and are very expensive—both financially and emotionally. To add insult to injury, in divorce court intimate details about your life are in the public record (available to anyone). There are other ways: instead of turning over their most important decisions to strangers, more and more divorcing and separating couples are choosing Collaborative divorce or divorce mediation. These couples make their own decisions by selecting a divorce that is more respectful, and which better preserves relationships, dignity, and privacy. This can be done through Collaborative Divorce and divorce mediation with the assistance of divorce lawyers who focus on helping couples in conflict come to agreement.

Benefits of Collaborative Divorce

You retain the important decisions about your life for yourself ... instead of turning over those decisions to divorce lawyers and/or the court.
At all times, you are an active participant in the process.
You have the assistance of divorce lawyers whose entire focus and effort is to help you reach settlement.
Your agreements can be as unique as you are.
You can have the benefit of education and support from other helpful divorce professionals, such as neutral financial specialists, child specialists, and divorce coaches.
You can avoid adding to the pain, and can realize real solutions, by working through the issues instead of engaging in a power struggle.
You can preserve your post-divorce relationships while working through difficult issues.
You and your spouse work jointly to find solutions within a process structure that helps you stay on track.

Collaborative Divorce is not for everyone, so be sure to consult with a lawyer who is trained in the Collaborative Divorce process so you can make the right choice for you.

Read more about Collaborative Divorce.

A Divorce Settlement Consistent with Your Values and Priorities
When you and your spouse reach resolutions in your divorce that align with your values and priorities, the agreements are better and more durable. We work with you by listening carefully and focusing on your priorities for a divorce agreement. We then explore options and work with you to help create an agreement with your spouse—a reality-based divorce settlement that is consistent with your values and priorities.

Realities of Old-Style Divorce

Hiring divorce lawyers for an old-style divorce (which often involves the court (or an 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:

In a court divorce, a judge makes life-altering decisions for you ... and may get it wrong. You get to live with the consequences.
Court divorce proceedings are extremely expensive (more than you would likely imagine or be quoted).
Old-style divorce often starts a destructive cycle where one court battle or power struggle merely follows another. These cycles can go on for years with “modifications” and other proceedings.
A court divorce inevitably exacts an emotional toll for all involved. It is not uncommon for everyone to emerge from court embittered.
Often, court decisions become meaningless “paper judgments”—court orders that are not followed. Starting in a that require additional court procedures to be enforced and even end up never being followed.
The court usually does a poor job restructuring families. Most judges, divorce lawyers, and arbitrators lack training in family systems or child development. Most don't even understand that they are simply perpetuating an unhelpful power struggle, and contribute to creating dysfunctional post-divorce families.
In a court divorce, intimate details of your finances and other matters become a public record, often permanently available to anyone.
Old-style divorce is structured as an adversarial system, where it is assumed that advocacy must be “zealous” (a euphemism for: scorched earth). 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.

Alternatives to an Old-Style Divorce and Old-Style Divorce Lawyers
Instead of the old-style way of having a stranger make the most important decisions in your life, you have the option of selecting a process in which you make your own divorce decisions with professional support. Most old-style divorce lawyers do not yet offer that option. Both the Collaborative Divorce process and divorce mediation are designed to allow you to make the decisions about your post-divorce future. When supported by divorce lawyers who are trained and experienced in this style of divorce settlements, couples can often get a divorce that preserves relationships, dignity, and privacy. Instead of engaging in a dynamic that tries to create a “winner” at the expense of a “loser,” this new style of divorce focuses on the questions that need to be addressed and solutions to those questions. This is one of the prime focuses of the divorce lawyers in a Collaborative Divorce. Similarly, a divorce mediation a impartial mediator focuses solely on helping you reach 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.

A Divorce Settlement Can Help Protect Your Privacy
Collaborative Divorce 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 remain private and confidential. And, unlike a decision following a divorce trial, many of the details of your divorce settlement can remain confidential by placing them in a private binding contract. 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.

Seeking a solution instead of a battle?