Collaborative Divorce: An Alternative to the Traditional Adversarial Divorce
Those of you who know me know that I am particularly interested in family law. Through my experiences learning about and observing the practice of family law, I have become convinced that our adversarial system is, more often than not, a poor way to resolve divorce. This is especially true where children are in the picture.
So what’s the alternative? I don’t know, but I did learn about a relatively new process that was created to avoid litigation in these cases called Collaborative Divorce (CD). The CD process involves both parties to the divorce voluntarily signing a contract called a “Participation Agreement”. The participation agreement states that each party agrees to work toward a negotiated resolution and will not litigate the case. To me, it sounded like a good possible solution for people who don’t want to be dragged into litigation. But, the more I looked into CD, the more I realized it couldn’t be for everyone (or even most individuals) who are going through a divorce.