Collaboratin’
The purpose of the trip to Texas is to meet with colleagues of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals. These folks are mostly lawyers, along with some mental health, financial, and other professionals who are pioneering a new approach to conflict resolution...collaboration. Collaboration is the concept of two sides sitting down and working together to find the best resolution to their conflict. What a concept.
The Lovely Linda and I are involved -- she on the board of directors, I on the advisory board -- because we see this as a far saner way for people who disagree to interact. When I married her, moved to Redding, and set up my office in Linda’s house, I also took on the responsibility for having dinner on the table when she came home from her family law practice. In the first couple of evenings, she would tell me about her cases. Most were, to some degree, horror stories. It’s amazing how badly people behave when they are divorcing or disputing custody arrangements.
Indeed, so awful was their behavior that I told Linda I didn’t want to hear about it; it made me sick, literally. She said she had to talk about it. I half-jokingly told her to call her daughter, with whom I was on the outs at the time. Linda demurred. It was at that time that there was a cover story in the Pacific Sun, a weekly publication in Marin County, from where I had just relocated, about Pauline Tesler and her collaborative work in family law.
It was one of those wonderful synchronous events, that I saw the paper, and I gave it to Linda. She said she’d been thinking along those lines. I nudged her further. In a short time, she had contacted Pauline, and had brought her to Redding to train some of the local family law attorneys. Linda founded the Collaborative Attorneys of Northern California, and the ball was rolling. She subsequently joined the IACP, and yesterday saw us on our way to the third annual meeting of the organization.
Collaboration is a really big deal. It’s a sea change in social conduct. In collaborative family law, instead of lawyers becoming gladiators, as they had been taught to do in law school, they sit down together with their clients and the four people figure out what is the best settlement of the divorcing couple’s affairs. Certainly no divorce is a happy time, but with half of all marriages so ending, it is less a disaster and more one of life’s passages.
In the collaborative process, the participants bring their higher selves to the table, and with dignity and mutual respect, they untie the marital knot, unsplicing the various connections of property, incomes, geography and emotions. It’s a challenge, but when the parties tap into their individual humanity -- e.g., why they got married -- they are able to wend their way to a just settlement.
More than an issue of who gets the house and what level of financial support might be provided, the collaborative process looks to the future in a way traditional never does. For instance, a couple can plan for the college education of a now-four-year-old which the courts can’t do. And more importantly, the very fact that the parents learn to figure out the right solutions creates a foundation for getting along when their children graduate, get married, and have children of their own. It provides those children with two parents, who have agreed to get along, for the benefit of the next -- and succeeding -- generations.
Kinda exciting. Very important. More later.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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