The team moves at your pace.
Whether you’re motivated to move quickly through the process, or you are seeking a slower, deliberate process, the team is able to accommodate your needs. In a traditional divorce, the timeframe is set by one-size-fits-all statutory deadlines that may not be appropriate for your family.
Your goals and priorities are central to the process.
At the start of a collaborative divorce, each client is asked to compile a list of their goals for the process and after. Some examples include developing co-parenting skills together, maintaining financial security, or ensuring that you receive a fair split of the marital assets. Your goals help the professional team that is supporting you in the process understand what is important to you when exploring various options and scenarios. In a traditional divorce, your marriage is treated more like a business dissolution than a unique set of emotionally-charged circumstances and history.
Your family’s privacy is safeguarded.
Because the conversations and negotiations in a collaborative divorce occur in a private, non-litigation setting, people feel free to have some of the awkward conversations that are necessary to resolving underlying issues in a divorce. Further, collaborative divorces typically occur with minimal filing of court documents, which helps to protect your family’s privacy. In a traditional divorce, extensive personal and financial documents are often filed with the court and are accessible to the public.
Your children are not weaponized.
In a collaborative divorce, parents work with a collaboratively-trained licensed mental health neutral who facilitates co-parenting conversations and helps parents develop a parenting plan and timesharing schedule that is best for the children. Unfortunately, in a traditional divorce, children often end up being treated like objects to fight over and “win.”
Your family’s finances are protected.
Each family in a collaborative divorce is guided by a collaboratively-trained and licensed financial neutral, who gathers all of the necessary financial information to create an overall picture of the family’s finances. This allows the team to explore financial options more efficiently than in the traditional divorce, where each side’s attorney, who rarely has any financial education, spends countless hours poring over financial documents and fighting with the other side to make sure everything is disclosed, and nothing is hidden.
You have the final say in what your future will look like.
At the conclusion of a collaborative divorce, you will decide what your future looks like. In a traditional divorce, your entire family’s history will be condensed into a brief hearing, where a judge who is a stranger to your family will hear minimal evidence and testimony and then decide your future for you. Instead of handing over your family’s future to a stranger, collaborative divorce allows you to stay in control of your family and your future.