Family Attorney
Collaborative law is flourishing in the Twin Cities
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The divorce proceedings had not been pretty. Fraught with hurtful recriminations over infidelities and other bitter circumstances, the couple came to St. Paul family lawyer Mary Antonia Wilmes to work out a divorce agreement. Wilmes used the principles of collaborative law to get the two sides together, and after weeks of sometimes rancorous discussions, the couple came to their final meeting and told Wilmes that they had come from the bedside of their daughter, who was in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. “They would never have gone to see her together before that,” recalls Wilmes. “I couldn’t imagine the regret they would feel later if they hadn’t been able to be there for their daughter that way.” Wilmes gives much of the credit for the successful resolution of that case to the use of collaborative law. Like a growing number of family lawyers, Wilmes is a strong believer in collaborative law, which values cooperation over confrontation and encourages lawyers – and the parties they represent – to share information, treating cases like problems to be solved rather than bloody battles to be won. As part of the collaborative law method, both parties retain separate attorneys whose job it is to help them settle the dispute, as they would in a normal case. The main difference is that the case cannot go to court. If that should happen, the collaborative law process terminates and both attorneys are disqualified from… Source : accessmylibrary.com |
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