Brigitte Bell, PC - Collaborative Law

Mediation and Collaborative Pr | Collaborative Law

Collaborative Practice
Fact:You need a divorce.

Fact: You’ve heard horror stories about the legal system traumatizing the people emotionally and depleting the marital assets. While there maybe some exaggeration in these stories, they are pervasive enough in the culture to make you concerned.

Fact: You and your spouse have been able to cooperate and discuss your issues reasonably and want to keep it that way. You want the lawyers to be helpers and counselors, not gladiators for whom the fight itself seems more important than the particular result for you and your family.

Fact: You have a limited budget for the divorce and want to be wise about how you spend those dollars so that you get the best representation, the most effective solutions, and respectful handling of your situation, including also keeping control of the timing.

Fact: You want help making sure the children are protected during and after the legal process.

Given those facts, what can you do?

Use the Collaborative Law Process to get a divorce with dignity, creativity, and respect for all participants. Here’s how it works:

Lawyers who practice Collaborative Law have committed to an amicable, non-adversarial approach to the divorce process.

Collaborative Lawyers and participants agree to use problem-solving rather than litigation to figure out their tough issues.

Collaborative Lawyers and participants jointly commit to full, voluntary disclosure of relevant information and documents, thus eliminating the need for expensive, arcane "discovery", subpoenas, depositions, and interrogatories.

Collaborative Lawyers and clients, when they need input from professionals about valuation, financial issues, child-related issues, or other concerns, jointly chose one expert, also trained in the

collaborative process, to provide honest, impartial, helpful guidance for the problems actually facing the group.

Collaborative Lawyers and clients meet and work together and share information and concerns simultaneously, reducing both the cost and "lost in translation issues" that occur when the communication chain is client A to lawyer A to lawyer B to client B and back again.....

Note that the number of clients who ask about and decide to use the Collaborative Law Process for their divorce or family issues is increasing as the information about its success is spreading in Illinois.

How is Collaborative Law different from Mediation?

If you use the mediation process, the parties each have a "mediation-friendly" lawyer who supports the process and consults with them throughout. The main work, however, is done with the two parties meeting with a neutral, impartial mediator who helps them reach agreement on all the issues between them, both those that the court expects them to have an agreement about and those that matter to them, regardless of whether the law requires agreement. The mediator, who even if a lawyer is not allowed to be "practicing law" at the same time, would write up a Memorandum of Agreement memorializing what the parties have agreed to in mediation, and the lawyers would turn that into the final Marital Settlement Agreement that gets incorporated into the final Judgment for Dissolution, the legal document that officially ends the marriage and declares the two parties divorced.

In the Collaborative Law process, each party has a lawyer who is trained in the Collaborative Process, which includes also mediation training, and there is no separate mediator . Since the lawyers and parties are all committed to an amicable solution and a problem solving approach, the process seems a lot like mediation with friendly lawyers in the room. The difference is that the lawyers are the ones guiding the process, whereas in mediation a single mediator would. In Collaborative Law, the clients and lawyers meet together, whereas in mediation the lawyers often do not attend the sessions but simply consult with their clients. (Sometimes clients ask their lawyers to come to the mediation sessions, sometimes the mediator asks that the lawyers join a session.)

The other difference is that the lawyers can write up the agreement and take the matter to closure through the legal system, whereas the mediator has to turn the writing of the final legal documents over to the lawyers.

Brigitte Bell is a Fellow and founding president of the Collaborative Law Institute of Illinois and is co-chair of the training committee. She is one of the spokespersons for the process in Illinois. She has been a trained mediator for twenty years.

Search Mediate.com

Search: and/or search terms

Brigitte Bell Mediation, Ltd.