It's never easy to go through a divorce. The process places stress on everyone involved, from the husband and the wife to their children and extended family.
The worst kind of divorce is the long, drawn-out and bitter kind. Fortunately, couples who can agree to set aside their differences for the good of everyone involved, do have an alternative option: They can work with a collaborative divorce attorney who can make the difficult process a little less painful.
Do Judges Know Your Family Best?
At the end of most divorce cases, it is judges who decide final settlements. Unfortunately, these judges often seem like the wrong people to make these decisions.
For one thing, judges do not personally know the family members involved in the divorce proceedings. They don’t understand the issues and needs of each party. Often, the judgments that judges hand down seem unfair and arbitrary to everyone involved. In other cases, judges seem to pass down decisions that seem to unfairly favor one party over the other.
But if both parties in a case agree to hire one, a collaborative divorce attorney can help divorcing parties reach compromises that, hopefully, leave everyone involved in a case satisfied. Couples can contact The American Bar Association, which maintains a list of such professionals, to find a qualified collaborative divorce attorney.
Divorcing Couples Must Work Together
When hiring these attorneys, both parties have to agree to certain rules: First, they must agree to work together to reach important decisions regarding child custody and the divvying up of assets. Parties working with a collaborative divorce attorney agree to not only consider their own personal needs but what's best for everyone in the family. The goal is to help the parties involved agree on binding decisions that don't unfairly favor one party over the other.
Often, collaborative attorneys may call in outside experts to help resolve cases. When working with a collaborative attorney, both sides in a divorce case must agree to allow financial planners, child therapists and other consultants to testify and use their expertise.
The Basics of a Successful Collaborative Divorce
To reach successful conclusions, collaborative divorces require that everyone involved in them follow the same rules. Each member of the divorcing couple, for example, must accurately and completely share his or her financial information. Couples must agree, too, to work in good faith with one another. This, of course, can be a major challenge.
Couples should be aware of one potential downside to using a collaborative divorce attorney. Whenever parties are unable to come to an acceptable resolution, they are required to excuse the collaborative attorneys and hire new legal representation. Unfortunately, this basically means starting the whole process over again.
A collaborative divorce attorney is not the right choice for every couple involved in a divorce, of course. Some couples are simply not willing to work together toward compromises. Those couples should stick with traditional legal representation.
Many couples, though, recognize that collaborative divorce attorneys can help make what is always an emotionally jarring process just a little easier.
Dan Rafter - I'm a freelance writer with more than 15 years experience covering the residential and commercial real estate industries. Of course, this ...
