A Collaborative Divorce is not the same as people acting friendly with each other but really acting the same way. To get different results, it is a distinct process with its own rules and conventions.
Collaborative Divorce is a voluntary process with its own protocols and formalities that help maximize the likelihood of a successful resolution. The professionals are not only committed to represent clients without invoking the courts, but have training and experience in interest-based communication and the Collaborative Divorce process.
The first step in a Collaborative Divorce is building the Collaborative team. Once you and your spouse decide that a Collaborative Divorce is right for you, your attorneys will need to coordinate on several logistical matters (mostly revolving around the agenda for the first meeting) and make the necessary arrangements to get the process started.
Each of you will meet with your Collaborative lawyer to prepare for the first joint session and the process to come. Normally, that meeting will be a combination of exploring what may be important to, your conflict styles, and a review of details of the process. Surprises are rarely helpful, so this meeting is very important.
What is not likely at this first lawyer meeting is discussing what the outcome of your case might look like. There are two reasons for this. First, at this early stage, your lawyer cannot possibly have enough information to be able to give you more than a wild guess that is likely to be wrong. Second, in a Collaborative divorce, you and your partner are the ones who decide the outcome of your case once you are both ready to do so in the third stage of the process.
Once those preliminaries are concluded, the lawyers and the parties will meet together to lay the foundation for the process. The precise agenda for this foundational meeting is provided by your attorneys. The first foundational meeting will normally include reviewing and signing the Participation Agreement, which formally starts the process. It will also include other process discussions of what is coming up, with the goal of reaching agreement on the process.
After that initial foundational meeting, the process has three progressive stages:
- Stage One: Information Gathering
- Stage Two: Generating Options
- Stage Three: Co-Creating the Agreement
Each stage has several components, designed to ensure that everyone has the information needed to make good decisions and that all possible resolutions are considered. More detail on each of these stages can be found on the Stages of the Process page.
A key part of the Collaborative divorce process is that agreements are reached without taking positions or making threats.
Moreover, while a likely court outcome might be an important piece of
information, a Collaborative Divorce agreement does not try to replicate such a
court outcome. Instead, agreements are jointly built based on the understanding that all parties have in common the desire to reach an agreement that will be durable
and will work over the long term. An agreement that is likely to unravel is rarely in anyone’s interest
so, paradoxically perhaps, it is necessary to ensure that any agreement
adequately meets the needs of all parties so that it is durable. That is one more reason why the Collaborative Divorce process is a very different process from normal market negotiations.
By contrast, coerced or agreements based on the assertion of power tend to
breed resentment, and often does not adequately meet at least one party's needs.
The resentments that coerced agreements tend to create also harbor the seeds for
the agreement unraveling.
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How Collaborative
Divorce Works