Collaborative divorce provides clients with specially trained lawyers, mental health practitioners who serve as divorce coaches and child specialists, and financial experts who develop an out-of-court resolution to your case that retains your privacy and respects the individual particularities of your family. This model challenges parents to develop agreements based on their family's needs and interests, related to the children, and in financial matters. Collaboration uses the negotiations as a venue for exploring decisions about the future in a very thoughtful and deliberate manner. This process, unlike all the others, has a future focus, and engages clients in real-time reality-testing about their proposed settlement options so that the likelihood of having unresolved future post-decree battles is significantly reduced.
Collaborative Divorce, unlike litigation:
Promotes open communication
Encourages mutual respect
Prevents power-based and often protracted legal battles and maneuvering.
Protects family privacy and confidentiality
Educates parents to develop a co-parenting process with improved communication and agreed procedures that support the realities of children living with consistency in two households. In this context, they can develop a healthy respect for parents' differences, and focus on maintaining loving relationships with each parent without fear of betraying loyalties toward either parent.
Results in creative and responsive agreements that reflect a degree of attention to the particular needs of each unique family
Serves the goals and concerns of each participant in the divorce
May include the voices of the children in the process
allows the parties to implement experimental outcomes to assess the benefits and disadvantages of considered options without fear of having established precedents that are then used as leverage in negotiations.
*After all the negotiations have been agreed to and memorialized in contracts between the parties, the attorneys file a case in court and present the agreements for review and approval of the court.
For more information about Collaborative divorce and whether it's right for you, click on the link below: collablawil.org/questions-and-answers-illinois-collaborative-divorce/
