Collaborative Law: Advantages Over Traditional litigation

We don’t leave the concepts and the outcomes of litigation at the door when we collaborate. People hear stories from everyone they know, family members, friends, co-workers, and most of those stories, of course—because the way we’ve always done things—is to litigate and most of those stories come from litigation in that environment. So it’s really important to people to hear what happens in litigation. We don’t do a collaborative process in a vacuum. We’re going to talk to folks about, you know, if you had to go in, yeah, the guidelines might say this. I mean, this is what the guidelines say and this is what the potential outcome would be. And this is what the outcome would be on a visitation schedule. Here’s what a property division might look like. But the box is so small for the judges once they get to that point. If you ask a third party to make the decision, they have to do it within the box of the law, and they’ve got to do it with very nominal information. They do not have time to go into the individual intricacies of the family finances or the way the family is structured and make individualized decisions. In collaborative, you have the opportunity to make your own individualized decisions for the family, both financially and as far as the kids go. But we don’t do it in a vacuum.