Family Attorney
Collaborative law can reduce rancor in divorce cases
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If you were to create a legal process to end your marriage, would you want the judge to make the decisions for you or would you want to retain control? When the judge is in charge, all your energies are focused on promoting yourself. You want the judge to know the best things about you and the worst things about your spouse. If you want custody of your children, for example, you will position yourself as the better parent by giving examples of your spouse’s bad parenting decisions. Your lawyer will help you build the most effective arguments. Your spouse, of course, will be doing the same against you. The judge may appoint an investigator to gather additional information in order to decide where your children will live, and when and how often each of you will see them. Once the judge has made a decision, you and your spouse will be expected to work together to raise your children by following the schedule imposed on you by the court. Clearly, this is not a recipe for peace and cooperation. In 1990, an experienced family lawyer ended a long, hotly contested divorce trial swearing he would never do it again. Stuart Webb believed that the existing system was failing families. He felt there had to be a better way to end a marriage - one where the divorcing couple could retain control of the decisions. He enlisted other like-minded family lawyers in Minneapolis to move away from the blame game and encourage clients to focus on the future. Recognizing that we live in a society where 50 percent of marriages end, divorce would be treated as a normal, predictable life passage. The lawyers would act as legal counselors, not adversaries, to help their clients build a new relationship, one that would be different and less intimate, but no less valuable. This would allow divorcing couples to retain their dignity and self-respect as they built their separate lives. More : masslive.com |
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