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What Is Collaborative Divorce?
Collaborative divorce is a relatively new method of handling divorce in a cooperative and non-confrontational style. Making the process more amicable and allowing the couple to retain more wealth for themselves, their kids, and their charities.
Divorce can get unpleasant and ugly very fast. Emotions are high, especially when involving children. It is important to try to make the best possible arrangement to benefit both parties. Collaborative divorce is ideal in situations involving children. As it works towards providing the maximum benefit to everyone.
There is usually a team of mental health professionals, financial counselors, and the couple’s individual attorneys working together in a collaborative divorce. The mental health professional and the financial counselor maintain a neutral position throughout the settlement. On the other hand, custody battles can be very exhausting, time-consuming, extremely expensive, traumatic, and upsetting for children and parents alike.
Disputes can revolve around issues related to the children and financial ones resulting in many disagreements that keep building up.
Collaborative divorce is better in many ways. As it can save you a lot of money and prevent matters from going to trial. As well as, it helps things from getting hostile and ugly. Most of the issues are resolved around the table, and settlements are reached.
Why Are Traditional Litigation Divorces Costly?
The primary reason why litigation cases end up being so costly is because of the expense of formal discovery. This involves many back-and-forth correspondences, pages of evidence, and hearings and trials. All of this takes time and money. In a collaborative divorce, there is initially one mutual neutral financial advisor who will review all your statements, documents, assets, and liabilities for both parties.
In a litigated case, each party has its own, and the attorney then cross-checks everything that the other party has mentioned in their documents. Again this delays the process and ends up becoming more expensive.
In a collaborative case, both parties have signed up to a neutral and fair agreement that is beneficial to both parties. The financial neutral should be someone who has not worked with either party before and has to agree never to work with either party in the future.
Advantages of a Collaborative Divorce
There are many advantages to choosing the option of a collaborative divorce:
- Since divorce is a private matter, collaborative divorce often gets settled around a table in a closed room rather than going to court. The process and its details remain discreet and don’t become public knowledge as in a litigated case
- Collaborative divorce also helps provide insight into your life and your relationship, helping you rebuild your life and prepare for retirement better than when divorce is carried out in a litigated manner. In the case of the latter, often couples are left traumatized and distraught for a significant period in their lives, unable to pick up the pieces after their divorce.
- Collaborative professionals working as a team can help you. You as a couple can decide how you want to part ways in an amicable manner rather than a courtroom judge who is a complete stranger and knows nothing about you and your children.
- This is definitely the more peaceful and amicable route and is less stressful for you and your children. Collaborative divorce methods shield your children from the anguish of divorce and place the children’s well-being at the highest priority. More badly ending divorces can leave children scarred for a very long time; hence child specialists that are a part of the team help advise the parents on the best way to go along this process.
- The traditional divorce process is long and exhausting and requires a lot of court hearings and meetings. These can be very difficult to manage if you have a demanding job or small children and can’t leave them all the time.
Additional Advantages
- Each side gets an attorney to advocate for their respective parties. They do this respectfully and cooperatively rather than adopting a hostile or aggressive demeanor. The goal is to get both parties to agree on a fair and agreeable settlement for everyone.
- The collaborative divorce team consisting of a mental health professional, parenting counselor, and financial counselor might actually help solve many of your issues that you had not been able to resolve while being married. These include behavioral issues in your child or financial problems which you had not been able to work around initially. They may provide a different perspective and help work around many of your previous issues.
- The overall cost of the collaborative divorce is much less than the traditional litigation process and ends up providing greater returns on investment.
Conclusion
Divorce is not a pleasant matter, and no one goes into a marriage prepared for a divorce. But if you are a high net worth individual and have a significant amount of assets to your name. Or have family money then it is always best to enter into a prenuptial agreement before marriage.
It doesn’t hurt to discuss with an attorney. Do you can define what belongs to you, your spouse, or the both of you. It also helps to maintain all this information in a book. So that in case of an emergency, the other partner knows where to look.
Family law does not have to be complex and difficult to understand. Whether or not you are having marriage trouble, it should not be difficult to understand your legal options. Spirit One aims to provide simple and free legal information. Accessible to all those who find law and legal matters too complicated.
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