Excerpts from "Capital Region lawyers get feet wet with collaborative divorce trend":
A group of at least 25 matrimonial lawyers is trying to forget their experiences with divorce proceedings and replace them with a new process: collaborative divorce.
They're joined by financial advisers, mental health professionals and others aiming to establish a concept in the Capital Region that's already in place elsewhere in the state and nation.
Following an April 4 and 5 seminar, the participants will pursue a divorce method designed to keep couples out of the court system. And they expect to save themselves
time and energy while reducing their paperwork.
Above all, it's a fundamental shift that's not designed to fit all divorces, or even all divorce attorneys. But advocates believe it will quickly become popular as a new antidote to New York's fault-based divorce system, changing the way divorce and family lawyers operate as much as it alters their clients.
But for attorneys trained to be adversarial, it's not always easy to grasp the goal: the best possible arrangement for both parties. The concept, different from more common mediation, is becoming more mainstream across the country. But experts cautioned that attorneys shouldn't view it as a way to immediately boost their business.
"The problem we run into is that you have a lot of very strong litigators who have now jumped on the collaborative law bandwagon, taken a two-day seminar and expect to make that very difficult paradigm shift overnight," said Nancy Gardner, an attorney and board member of the New York State Council on Divorce Mediation.
"It's not working in a lot of cases," she added.
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Collaborative divorce is also spreading fast on a global scale, becoming popular in Canada, Australia and western Europe. In August 2007, the American Bar Association's ethics committee lent credibility to the process when it ruled that the agreement not to go to court didn't create a conflict of interest for attorneys.
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Collaborative divorce law was born almost 20 years ago in the brain of Minneapolis attorney Stu Webb. He'd been trained in divorce mediation, but his frustration with the court system was making him consider giving up his law practice.Instead, he created collaborative law. . . .
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But it's not right for every divorce. As Suzanne Brunsting, a Rochester collaborative divorce attorney, put it: "We have to find a little bit of good will for the other spouse."
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"People are required to work together much more than in the past," [JoAnn Shartrand] said. "With this, everyone is happier."
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