How is Collaborative Divorce different from a “traditional” divorce?

From start to finish, Collaborative Divorce supports you, encourages you and helps you work with your spouse to create the settlement YOU want. In a litigated divorce (or “Traditional”) divorce, the attorneys (and maybe the judge) decide upon the settlement on your behalf.

Collaborative helps you take charge of your settlement agreement and move forward with a plan that you actually like, one that will persevere through the years.

In a typical divorce, each spouse hires an attorney and really hand the attorney the job of navigating that divorce settlement. So in Collaborative divorce, each spouse also hires their own dedicated attorney, but those attorneys are Collaboratively trained and have experience in the Collaborative divorce process. In addition to those attorneys, the spouses work together to hire a mental health professional, (sometimes called a Collaborative divorce coach) who is a neutral party and is not advocating for either side. Often they also hire a financial neutral to help navigate any difficult or complex financial situations.

Typically what happens next is that all of the parties, including: each spouse, their attorney, the financial neutral, and then the mental health professional, all sit together at the table and work through all the components of the settlement for divorce.

So, this means the team works together to decide the division of assets, the parenting plan, any support payments that will need to be made, how to handle taxes, etc. The benefit to doing it this way is that everything's on the table, everything's transparent, and the spouses do the difficult work of creating the settlement on their own. But the benefit to that is that you end up with a settlement that is really unique to you, and one that you can be happy with for years to come.