The “holistic” approach has been applied to nutrition, health or healing and therapy for thousands of years.  Now there is a holistic approach to divorce.  Collaborative Divorce is the most recent trend in matrimonials.  Collaborative divorce allows the the practitioner and the parties to address the economic, emotional, psychological, financial aspects of the divorce collectively, instead of parts of it.  Both spouses are represented by an experienced attorney throughout the process and everyone enters into an agreement where they commit to work toward working out a settlement that addresses the concerns of the couple, instead of interests of respective clients.   The parties and the lawyers have a four-way conference to address all issues after signing an agreement that binds the parties to several things, including not going to court.

          There are several advantages to the collaborative divorce, from it being economically feasible (since the rates are usually less than contested divorce rates) to its consideration of the emotional turmoil the parties and their children face during the typical divorce process.  One additional adanvantage is that if the parties are unable to come to a settlement agreement after exhausting several attempts, the attorneys must withdraw and the parties must find new attorneys and start the process all over again or proceed to court.  This important stipulation is premised on the belief that parties are more inclined to agree if they know that they will have to start all over, thus enduring more time and expenses in resolving the divorce.  In  this type of divorce, child custody, child visitation, child support, property distribution will all be addressed and although the parties should eventually agree on all of these issues, if they hit a snag experts in these areas may be brought in to help facilitate a resolution.  However, once another professional member has been brought into this process, that expert may not work with the client again outside of this process.  

Collaborative divorce is now available in 35 states.  New York, happens to be one of the states who recently started to utilize collaborative divorces. 

Difference between Mediation and Collaborative Divorce:

          Although collaborative divorce resembles mediation in its method of trying to avoid litigation, but they are very different.  For one, in mediation there is one neutral neutral mediator and the parties are usually not represented by counsel ( although they have the option to retain counsel).  And the mere fact that the adversarial nature that counsel usually brings is missing, strongly impacts the process of resolving all of the thorny issues.

          In collaborative divorce, although the objective is to avoid going to court, as it is in mediation, there is no binding agreement between the parties to prevent them from doing so in mediation.  In fact, with the parties appearing pro se in mediation, they are forced to advocate on their own behalf which does not necessarily lend itself to an effective and expeditious resolution, thus it is not uncommon for the mediating parties to end up going through a traditional contested divorce.
          Both methods require that the parties be open and honest about all of their assets, but in mediation, there is no real incentive to be forthcoming since there rarely an experienced attorney advocating on behalf of either party.  In other words,  the likelihood of the inexperienced party being able to ascertain the scope of potential assests is minimal.  However, at any time during mediation any party can retain an attorney to represent them in the mediation or they can forego the process altogether and pursue the divorce by going to court.  Unlike in collaborative divorce, the lawyers and the parties are bound to the agreement to either proceed without going to court or abandon the process altogether and start all over again.  So, needless to say the parties’ intentions in choosing to go the collaborative divorce route must be to genuinely resolve the issues without court intervention.  Mere conflicts or challenges do not warrant giving up on the process entirely, the lawyers will bring in experts to help resolve the contentious issues.

            The future of collaborative divorce looks promising since there are several reasons why it would appeal to practitioners and clients alike.   A focus on the individuals’ needs in every sense is what matters to most of us.