collaborative law

having gone through the process,{it has taken a year }i will shortly be divorced ,sol has cost a lot !!! .
but final deal on the table is a lot better than ex or court would have come up with, so child and i will be ok.
my advice is as all sols charge the same amount ,do your homework and get one that is really good at family law

Thanks, it's good to get feed back. I bet it didn't cost anything like £95k which was the combined total of H & W legal costs quoted by one poster recently and I don't think they even got as far as the final hearing.

HI

Could you please explain to me what collaborative law is and exactly how it works in terms that I might understand .
I am very interested in this subject as i have heard talk about it .

Thank you

Dido xx

Sorry, I'm in a bit of a rush but there is some info on my blog.

No, not any where near that amount ,but not as cheap as one might expect.
However you only get what you pay for,divorce is never a free lunch

L28 wrote

...is really good at family law

What do you mean by that or perhaps I should say, why do you say that? Just out of interest.

didojane, if no one has responded to your question privately, let me know and I will try to briefly inform you of my experiences of it.

Thanks for the pm DJ.
Please bear in mind I have only experienced this method of divorce.
My ex decided to leave me. I have my own business and needed to sort financial situation out pretty quick so I knew where I was to carry on my business. 3 kids involved.
You will hear varying arguments about the cost i.e. some will say it's a cheaper way some more expensive.(Compared to going to court).
The idea is you compromise and agree. IMHO difficult at a time of incredible stress when you feel like you are losing everything.
I was also told (on this forum a while ago) it doesn't work if you want to kill your ex. Sadly my feelings at the time.
However, we did manage it.
Basically you employ a solicitor (trained in col' law) and so does your ex. You sign a contract to say you will try to sort this out collaboratively and stick with it. If either of you (you or your ex) decide you can't then you have to ditch the solicitors and try a different route (prob court) and different solicitors. The contract I am told is the key. The contract you have signed encourages you both to compromise.
However, we never signed a contract as we were both keen to keep the solicitors we had chosen.
So we ended up having fourway meetings trying to agree things.(fourway=me and my solicitor, ex and hers all in the same room)
Your solicitor advises and brings matters to your attention and obviously vice versa. We had 'time outs' whereby something was brought up and me and my solicitor were able to go to a different room to discuss it privately.
And you chug along until everything is agreed. This can become very expensive if you don't agree.
For example if one says the Main asset is worth £100 and the other says no way it is only worth £50. You then start employing valuers, and everyone I am sure can find a valuer to agree with 'their' valuation.
Basically in our situation the two solicitors did most of the bargaining, saying, in their experience this is what would happen if we had to go to court. To a large extent we both went along with it.
IMO the solicitors sorted it rather than us but I had a lot to lose and did (financially)in this crazy divorce Law system.
We managed it.
I have banged on about finances, the actual divorce was pretty much form filling. She agreed to the petition. We agreed on how many nights with each of us for the children. I say agreed I would have loved to have them every night of the week but accepted it doesn't work like that, What would have happened if we had gone to court? Who knows. Does it make our (mine and ex's) relationship any better because we didn't go to court? Who knows. It did involve a large amount of complicated finances, just to make clear which mainly involved my inheritance rather than earnings throughout longish marriage.
My 'relationship' with my ex is not good. It is ok for the children.
I don't know whether this has helped but this is/was my experience of collaborative law.

I am sure there are many others with different experiences.

Any other questions, however simple you may feel they are, please feel free to ask DJ and I will either post here or privately.
Sorry I know I said I would try and keep it brief!