Mediation and Collaborative Practice
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 lawyers.
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