Collaborative divorce is an amicable approach to divorce available in the state of Washington that allows couples to negotiate their divorce settlement outside of court with the assistance of an interdisciplinary team. Both parties commit to settling their divorce through private negotiation rather than in court. Regardless of whether a couple has many disagreements or none, collaborative divorce allows couples to reach a divorce settlement with mutual respect, integrity, and good will.
What sets the approach apart from mediation or pure uncontested divorce (in Washington state, this is when a couple files jointly for divorce) is the fact that each party is represented by their own attorney, a lawyer who advocates for their client’s interests while also being skilled in conflict resolution, peaceful communication, and mediation strategies. Couples might also hire additional professionals such as family therapists, child specialists, or financial advisors to support them when the time comes to negotiate. Because all parties (the couple and their attorneys) sign an agreement at the start of the process to settle the divorce outside of court, everyone has a stake in reducing conflict and finding solutions that work.
While there are other amicable approaches to divorce in Washington state, like mediation and filing jointly for divorce, collaborative divorce is the only path to amicable divorce that includes robust protections for couples navigating the legal, financial, and emotional aspects of divorce. Couples who choose collaborative divorce often share similar goals: they want to protect their finances; they want to maintain a friendly or cordial relationship with their ex; and if they have children, they want to establish a strong foundation for co-parenting, while protecting the children’s emotional, mental, and social well-being.
Collaborative divorce is an alternative to the adversarial approach to divorce. The standard adversarial approach to divorce is one where usually one partner hires a divorce lawyer, files for divorce, delivers divorce paperwork to their spouse who then hires their own divorce lawyer, and a court date is set.
As the divorce moves through the courts, each party’s lawyer fights for the interests of their client. Often, as the process unfolds, their communication gets handled through the intermediaries of the courts and their lawyers. Direct communication, collaboration, and goodwill between both parties can break down. Both sides spend their time trying to guess what a judge might say in each dispute, rather than focusing on solutions both parties can live with or even benefit from. Even if everyone’s goal to make the divorce as amicable as possible, the adversarial process seems to almost invite acrimony, conflict, and negative feelings. It’s just the way the court system is set up.
Collaborative divorce offers a more amicable alternative. At Truce Law, negotiations happen through online meetings with the support of your collaborative team, allowing for privacy. You get to choose your team based on your needs, rather than following the one-size-fits-all approach of the courts. If you need a financial advisor, you can bring in a financial advisor. If you need help with understanding the psychological and emotional impact of your parenting plan on your children, you can bring in a family therapist or child specialist. With collaborative divorce, your values and goals guide decision-making. You can search for creative solutions rather than just focusing on what would be possible under the letter of the law.
As Pauline H. Tesler and Peggy Thompson, pioneers in the collaborative divorce movement, explain in their book Collaborative Divorce: The Revolutionary New Way to Restructure Your Family, Resolve Legal Issues, and Move on With Your Life, “You don’t need to be a lawyer or a psychologist to know that going through a divorce is one of life’s roughest passages. It can cause a myriad of emotional responses that at times make you feel overwhelmed and limits your ability to think clearly or make good choices. Unfortunately, this occurs at the very time you are called upon to make the most important decisions of your life.”
The aim of collaborative divorce is to give you and your family the support you need to navigate divorce in a healthier way.
In this article, we’ll delve more deeply into how collaborative divorce works in Washington state.
This article is perfect for couples who want an amicable divorce and who want to divorce without going to court. If you’re thinking about pursuing mediation or uncontested divorce (filing jointly for divorce), this article will explain why, in many situations, the collaborative divorce process is superior.
How is Collaborative Divorce Different from Filing Jointly in Washington (Uncontested Divorce)?
Collaborative divorce is uncontested divorce. In Washington state, there’s no category of divorce known as “uncontested divorce.” Couples file a joint petition for dissolution of marriage, and when they file, they agree about everything and sign off on all the paperwork.
The difference with collaborative divorce is that couples achieve agreement through a careful and supported process of negotiation, professional input, and discussion.
Some couples might ask, “We agree about everything already. Why should we hire lawyers?”
Divorce is a serious legal process that involves the division of assets and debts. Couples who don’t work with lawyers before filing jointly run the risk of missing important details, and those who agree to everything their spouse wants to get a quick settlement, run the risk of giving up important rights, which can lead to regret and ongoing resentment. Once you finalize your divorce, you can’t go back.
While it is possible to file a joint petition for divorce without a lawyer, trying to do this isn’t advised, even by the courts. Furthermore, in order to successfully file the joint petition for dissolution of marriage, both parties must agree about all aspects of their divorce (including division of property and debts, child custody, alimony, and child support). This can be difficult to achieve without support.
Furthermore, divorce is a time of heightened emotion and stress. Psychologically, we know that people struggle to make good long-term decisions when emotions run high and when stress levels are elevated. You neither want to just capitulate or give in to everything your former spouse wants to keep the peace and reach a settlement, but you also don’t want to take a hard stance that puts an end to all discussions because of anger or resentment.
With collaborative divorce, you bring in a team of professionals who can help you find a good balance. Both parties hire divorce lawyers already committed to keeping the divorce outside of court. Rather than playing an acrimonious “game of telephone” through lawyers, leading to potentially incendiary legal filings, couples agree to sit down and work things out with their lawyers present. With collaborative divorce, you get the peace of mind of being represented by a lawyer whose goal is to help you resolve the matter fairly and with as little conflict as possible.
How is Collaborative Divorce Different from Mediation?
With mediation, one mediator acts as a neutral party to help a couple work through their differences. The mediator might sometimes be a divorce lawyer, but the mediator isn’t permitted to provide legal advice or represent either party legally.
After the couple reaches a settlement through mediation, they are still encouraged to show the settlement to their own attorneys who represent their individual interests, and who can provide legal advice about the settlement. A mediated divorce can sometimes get complicated, especially if the divorce lawyers raise issues about the mediated settlement agreement. The couple might end up back in mediation, or worse, in court. Sometimes a mediator will join an online session with both lawyers who might have already established an adversarial relationship. In this situation, the mediator might have to undo some of the damage that has already been done by litigation. Couples who work only with a mediator can face the same issues that couples face when they forego hiring lawyers.
With collaborative divorce, you hire lawyers committed from the outset to use mediation strategies and to reach a settlement that works. You get both legal representation and support in your negotiations. When you reach an agreement, it’s done.
Why Choose Collaborative Divorce?
Couples choose collaborative divorce for many reasons. Some just want the simplicity, amicability, and privacy of settling their divorce outside of court. When you go to court, everything you say can end up on the public record. Others don’t want to put their children’s lives or financial future in the hands of a stranger (the judge). Many couples who choose collaborative divorce do so for the sake of their children. They anticipate that as co-parents they’ll remain in their children’s lives for birthdays, graduations, marriage, and other special occasions. They don’t want to damage any remaining goodwill they have through a litigious divorce.
The skills learned in collaborative divorce help many couples transition from marriage to building the communication skills needed for a successful co-parenting relationship. Other couples have strong ties outside of marriage—they run a business together, or their social and community ties run deep and overlap. They want to honor the time they spent together by choosing to navigate divorce with mutual respect, friendship, and kindness. Collaborative divorce also offers a framework for problem-solving to help you and your former partner navigate conflicts after divorce, which is important if you’ll be co-parents.
What are the Requirements to Start a Collaborative Divorce?
Before the collaborative divorce process can begin, the leading collaborative divorce lawyers at Truce Law will ensure that clients meet some basic requirements first.
These include:
- Ensuring that there’s no history of domestic violence or coercive control in the marriage.
- Ensuring that both parties are open to negotiation. Collaborative divorce cannot work if one partner lies, hides information, or has a history of not being able to follow through on commitments.
- Requiring that couples assemble a collaborative divorce team that meets their needs. A very basic collaborative divorce team will consist of each spouse’s collaborative divorce attorney. Each attorney will work to represent his or her client’s interests while also being committed to resolving any conflict without dragging out the divorce in court or litigation. The team may also include financial neutrals (analysts or financial planners who can help the couple draft a sound financial settlement), therapists, counselors, estate planners, or other professionals who can help the couple with their parenting plan, estate plan, and more.
- Requiring that both parties sign an agreement that the divorce will be settled outside of court. If negotiations break down, both parties understand that they will then need to find new lawyers to take the divorce to court.
Different couples have different needs. Some couples might be able to finalize their collaborative divorce with just their collaborative lawyers on their team. Others with more complex financial situations might need a team that includes financial professionals and other advisors.
How Can I Prepare for Collaborative Divorce?
Collaborative divorce requires buy-in from both parties to work. You’ll both need to sign an agreement that you won’t take your divorce to court. It’s best to agree to the collaborative divorce process before either party files divorce papers, though your collaborative divorce lawyers can help you retract and de-escalate a situation if the divorce has already been initiated. It’s rarely too late to choose collaborative divorce.
Here are some things couples do to prepare for the collaborative divorce process:
- Discuss a divorce strategy and have a “divorce plan” in place. For too many couples, divorce is something that just happens when one partner files. Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. The decisions you make about how you move forward in your divorce early on can have a major impact on how your divorce unfolds later, and even on divorce outcomes. This is understandably challenging, because you need to make crucial and high-stakes decisions in the middle of the grief and disorientation of your marriage ending. Couples who choose collaborative divorce are often able to sit down to discuss how they would like their divorce to unfold, and after exploring different options, like mediation or uncontested divorce, they decide that collaborative divorce is right for them.
- Hire your collaborative divorce attorney.
- Many couples continue to attend couples’ counseling sessions or family counseling sessions. Couples who have worked through resentment, anger, guilt, and conflict are more able to make negotiations from a place of reason rather than emotion.
- Hire professional advisors. If your financial situation is complex, each party might need to hire their own financial advisors, financial neutrals, or other professions to help with the collaborative negotiations. Preparing for negotiations, often means assembling a strong team.
- Gather information. Get information about bank accounts, retirement accounts, pensions, deeds, and more. Talk to your financial advisor.
These are just some of the ways you can prepare for negotiations. Once you retain your collaborative divorce attorney, he or she can identify any additional preparations you’ll need to make for your specific situation.
What Can I Expect When I Choose Collaborative Divorce?
Once you and your partner choose collaborative divorce, you’ll start by meeting online with your own collaborative lawyer to discuss your goals and values. At Truce Law, we conduct these initial meetings online, for your convenience. Your lawyer will likely walk you through some of the issues that are likely to require discussion during negotiation, often questions like what you’ll do with your shared family home and how will you co-parent your children. Ultimately your collaborative divorce lawyer can help you arrive at higher goals and keep you focused on your deeper personal values, like being good co-parents, and moving forward amicably.
Your private online meetings with your collaborative lawyer serve as preparation for your first four-way team meeting (that is, a meeting between you, your former partner, and each of your collaborative divorce lawyers). The four-way team meeting can also take place online for your convenience. During this meeting, your collaborative divorce lawyers will begin the negotiation process. Sometimes the divorce can be settled in one or two four-way meetings, and sometimes the negotiation process becomes more involved.
Divorce can bring up strong emotions like grief, anger, guilt, and resentment, and even trigger the fight-or-flight response, and your divorce lawyer might guide you to work with a counselor or therapist to work with these emotions, so that when you do meet to negotiate, you can negotiate from a place of reason rather than emotion. Collaborative divorce lawyers work to help their clients avoid resentment-driven demands and guilt-based settlements.
These emotions can be powerful and can lead to individuals making decisions with life-long impact due to the passing feelings of a moment. An interdisciplinary team that includes family counselors familiar with dynamics of divorce can help you and your spouse arrive at settlements that come from a place of reason and higher goals, rather than the sadness, grief, guilt, or the anger of the moment.
You might also work with a child specialist who can help you understand how different co-parenting arrangements might impact your children and guide you on finding the best solution for your family and children. A child specialist can also meet with your children during your divorce, and help you understand how the divorce might be impacting them emotionally, educationally, socially, and more.
Divorce also can also raise important questions that involve financial planning, retirement planning, business valuation, investment strategies, and more. Depending on the complexity of your financial situation, you’ll either have a collaborative meeting with a financial neutral who can help you understand your divorce from the perspective of financial planning or hire your own financial advisor to help you take stock of your separate and shared financial situation. If you already have a financial advisor who handles your finances, you might work with him or her to gather information.
Ultimately, your collaborative divorce lawyer will give you legal advice and help you get the information you need to make considered decisions when you meet to negotiate your divorce settlement at the first online four-way meeting. Collaborative divorce lawyers are aware of negotiation and conflict resolution strategies and can lead divorce discussions in a manner that keeps them amicable and productive.
Many couples report that the skills and strategies they learned during the collaborative divorce process have helped them become better co-parents and have even helped them in future relationships.
The goal with collaborative divorce is to reach an outcome that is mutually beneficial. In any divorce settlement there are superficial goals (wanting the family home, for example), and the deeper need that achieving that goal satisfies (safety, security, connection to the past). Your collaborative divorce lawyer and team work to keep the focus on deeper goals. When you negotiate from this space, couples often discover many paths to mutually beneficial solutions.
What Collaborative Divorce Can and Cannot Do
- Collaborative divorce can’t make your divorce less painful. Divorce is painful and it’s important to feel your feelings and navigate your grief.
- What collaborative divorce can do is provide you with comprehensive support to reach an amicable divorce settlement.
- Collaborative divorce lawyers can’t make someone negotiate if they don’t want to negotiate.
- What collaborative divorce lawyers can do is help willing couples identify shared goals and values at the start of the process and find solutions that are mutually beneficial.
- Collaborative divorce lawyers can help you understand divorce laws in Washington state and help you decide how the law will guide and frame more flexible decision-making.
What Does a Collaborative Divorce Timeline and Schedule Look Like?
Every divorce is different and will have its own timeline and schedule, depending on the couple’s needs.
Here’s one simple timeline and schedule for a simple collaborative divorce:
- A couple chooses collaborative divorce, and each spouse hires and meets with their own collaborative divorce attorney.
- The couple signs a collaborative divorce agreement where they commit to keeping the divorce outside of court and commit to working with their collaborative attorneys to reach a divorce settlement without litigation.
- In some cases, meetings with professionals take place before the whole team assembles. The couple might work with a child specialist to discuss their proposed parenting plan or meet with a family counselor to work through strong emotions to prepare for negotiations. Other couples might meet with their financial advisor to gather documents and develop a financial plan for divorce.
- A four-way meeting between the couple and each of their collaborative lawyers meets to discuss proposed solutions. Sometimes solutions have already been worked out with the child specialist or family therapist regarding a custody plan, and sometimes the couple has worked through most of the financials with their financial neutral. The collaborative divorce lawyers review everything, offer input and legal advice about proposed solutions, troubleshoot potential issues, and, once everything looks good, draft a joint petition for divorce. For relatively simple situations where everyone agrees, sometimes only one or two meetings with the team is required. For more complex situations, more than one meeting might take place, and additional individual meetings with the child specialist, family therapist, or financial advisors might be scheduled in between to gather more information or work through solutions.
- The collaborative divorce lawyers file the joint paperwork, and the courts finalize the divorce without the need for anyone to appear in court.
Every divorce is different, and this is just a general outline of what can take place. Couples with complex financial situations may need more preliminary meetings, information gathering sessions, and more.
Next Steps
The collaborative divorce lawyers in Washington state at Truce Law are here to help you take the next steps if you think collaborative divorce is right for you. Contact the Truce Law team to schedule a Case Evaluation.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Every situation is unique. For guidance specific to your circumstances, consult a licensed family law attorney in your area.