Everyone has friends and family who have been through a marriage break-up. After spending tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers, they still haven’t achieved the outcome they were originally seeking. Luckily, it doesn't have to be this way. McCarthy Durie are one of the few law firms in Brisbane that are offering couples a way to beat the legal bills and have a Divorce with Dignity.The main reason why people feel they need to fight with one another is that the family law system is an "adversarial" system. This means that each person has to get a lawyer and try to argue why they should get some of the property or time with the children. This is a terrible way to resolve a dispute, especially when the divorcing parents will need to work together in the future to raise their children.
All this is going to change with a new way of doing family law called Collaborative Law. This system doesn't involve any lawyer’s letters or nasty text messages. Instead, couples sit down with their lawyers for a series of meetings, which are also attended by trained counsellors and financial planners. The collaborative process involves a series of steps:
First, the parties decide on a roadmap to settlement, where they agree on what their goals are in separating. With the help of the counsellors each person is encouraged to work through the issues which prevent them from reaching a settlement; If there is property to be divided, the couple then sit down with a financial planner, whose job it is to work out what the assets and the liabilities are and how they could be divided; If the couple have children, they can sit down with a child psychologist and work out how the childrens’ needs can be met, while allowing each parent to have as much contact as can be arranged.
Divorcing couples commonly list the following goals in the first meeting:
- I would like the children to stay in the house that they have always lived in;
- I would like to be involved in the children's lives as they grow older;
- I would like to pay the children's school fees as part of my child support payments;
- I would like to make sure that the money my parents lent us to buy the house is paid back first.
Collaborative law lets the parties set the agenda, not the lawyers or the courts. The lawyers are there to keep the lines of communication open, to make sure that the process and the parties are respected, and to give suggestions of possible solutions.
Interestingly, the collaborative approach is the most common approach that lawyers choose if their own marriage is breaking down. In one large firm in America their were 25 divorces over a 12 month period that involved lawyers who worked in that firm, and 24 of those lawyers chose to resolve the matter collaboratively, rather than go to Court. If all the lawyers are choosing to divorce this way, you know it is the best path.
If you or someone you know might be interested in a Divorce with Dignity, give Pierce Carstensen or Alison King a call on 3370 5100. The first meeting in a collaborative case is free of charge.
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