Collaborative Divorce in Palm Beach County
By: Cary B. Stamp, CFP®, CDFA™
In Palm Beach County, a movement is under way that hopes to redefine the traditional adversarial family law process. The collaborative divorce process is different from traditional family law because the intent is to eliminate the need for litigation. In the collaborative process, both spouses hire attorneys, a parenting specialist if needed and a neutral financial professional. According to practitioners, the key to the process is that both the parties and their attorneys sign a contract that if either party decides to abandon the process and litigate, both attorneys must resign and new counsel must be hired.
There are many attorneys that are aware of the collaborative process and are willing to work on a collaborative case in Palm Beach County. However, as a percentage of total cases, active collaborative cases are very rare. The concept sounds great but why don’t more attorneys adopt the process?
I believe a few of the reasons are:
- Resistance to change. Family law cases have traditionally been settled or litigated without the requirement that the attorney be fired if litigation is threatened. It is understandable that many attorneys would not want to be dismissed if their client or their client’s spouse decided they wanted to “have their day in court.” According to Palm Beach family lawyer and collaborative practitioner Victoria Vilchez, “I do not have any statistics on whether or not there have been true increases in the number of cases “going collaborative”, but I can say that I have experienced an increase in interest in the process by potential clients, although there remains some confusion and misunderstanding of what the true collaborative divorce process entails, and resistance by many attorneys (and thus their clients) who are not collaborative practitioners to participating in the collaborative process.”
- Possibly lower fees. If a case is settled amicably and requires less time by the attorney, the client fees could conceivably be significantly less than is the traditional adversarial process is used.
- The “win or lose” philosophy. There are some attorneys who entered the profession because they are great advocates and want to do everything they can to advocate for their clients. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this belief in a traditional litigation setting-that is why the client hired them! However, many times, this philosophy can preclude a belief that the outcome of a contested action could be a “win-win” for both sides.
What can an attorney do if they want to learn more about the collaborative process?
As a first step, in Palm Beach County, a visit to a meeting of the Collaborative Divorce Team, Inc. might be a good start.(The next meeting is at Noon on Thursday October 14th at 1500 Gateway Blvd. Suite 220 in Boynton Beach) The Collaborative Divorce Team, Inc. also provides training for their members so they understand the collaborative process. At a recent meeting, one family lawyer who was attending for the first time said he came to the group because “prospective clients were asking me about collaborative. When I explained that I could cooperate with the other attorney and we could get the same outcome, they were insistent that we use the collaborative process.” Despite its position as a new and novel approach to marital dissolution, it seems that collaborative divorce is making some inroads from the perspective of marketing the service. However, in Florida, these cases are still infrequent and raising public awareness seems crucial to increasing the use of the process.
When making a decision about whether to use the collaborative process, attorneys are forced to take into account the ability of the two parties to work together and reach an amicable outcome. In many cases, the parties cannot get along (or more bluntly, they hate each other) and they have a desire to get something out of the settlement that they consider non-negotiable. These types of cases will not work in the collaborative process. In the cases, where both parties want an outcome based on their needs and they view the process as an environment where both parties can win, then Collaborative Divorce may make sense.
Additional Sources of Information on Collaborative Divorce:
