For those people who have never been through a divorce, most of their knowledge on this topic comes from one of two sources:  mass media (movies and tv) or friends and family. Too often, these glimpses into this legal process give too little information about what actually goes on as couples go through this financially and emotionally taxing experience.

Here are a few things you should know about traditional divorce:

• Most divorces don’t go to trial; they are usually settled.
• For cases that go to trial, the process can take months or even years to conclude.
• Even when cases are settled, the process can go on for a long time, with the cost of information-gathering (“discovery”) often eating up a lot of financial resources.
• When cases go to trial, outcomes are often difficult to predict.
• The traditional legal process is “backward-focused,” that is, it requires the couple to highlight the things that went wrong during their marriage, which then leads to accusations back and forth, making their future relationship as co-parents exceptionally challenging.

How does the Collaborative Process (CP) change this picture?

• CP is a problem-solving process, focused on helping a couple plan for their future rather than obsessing over how the marriage failed.
• CP engages mental health and financial professionals who are unaligned with either spouse, so they can provide unbiased information to help the couple to reach a mutually workable outcome.
• CP wants families to succeed post-divorce, so attention is paid to what each spouse’s finances will look like after the process is over.
• When a couple needs to obtain a value of property or a business, CP helps them engage a single, unaligned valuation professional, thus avoiding the costly “battle of the experts” that often occurs in the traditional process.
• CP recognizes the emotional and psychological components that are always present but rarely adequately dealt with in a traditional process. CP uses mental health professionals, one who can help the couple learn to communicate more effectively in their post-divorce life, and another, a child specialist, who can help assess the children’s needs without having to lean in either parent’s direction.
• CP helps the couple obtain information about children’s developmental needs so that, rather than counting the hours each parent spends with the children, they can structure a parenting arrangement that serves their family best.

CP recognizes that the traditional divorce process, which too often has the spouses lobbing angry accusations at each other, will leave the couple with few tools to navigate through the brave new world of post-marital life. CP professionals are specially trained to encourage divorcing couples to concentrate on what is truly important to them as they work towards peacefully resolving their divorce.