Role of Professionals

Let Our Team Guide You Through This Time

Child Specialists | Coaches | Financial Specialists | Attorneys

The team seeks to understand what is important for each client and their family.
The team offers targeted legal, mental health and financial support.
The team brainstorms, suspends judgment, and refrains from negativity.
The focus is on problem solving and exploring options, allowing for creativity.
Ultimatums, roadblocks, barriers and negative criticism are removed.
The common goal is to support the parties in reaching settlement.

Pros Of Collaborative Divorce

California courts encourage collaborative divorce. Collaborative divorce negotiations tend to be less contentious, more amicable, less costly, and more streamlined. If the parties can agree to negotiate openly, honestly, and in good faith, then the divorce process can be much faster and much less stressful than taking a divorce through court. Your retained professionals will not only have specialized expertise helpful to crafting the best ultimate outcome objectively, but they will also have a more personal understanding of your family circumstances and your needs. Litigation puts your fate in the hands of a judge who only learns a limited amount of information while handling hundreds of other cases simultaneously. Litigation is often contentious, and therefore tends to take much longer and cost much more in the long run.

Benefits to the Collaborative Divorce process:

Facilitates a more respectful dissolution
High level of privacy and confidentiality
Clients have control over the outcome
Creative and unrestrictive ideas for settlement
Focus on children and post-divorce relationships
Richer mix of professional input and guidance

The Role of the Child Specialist in the Collaborative Process

The Child Specialist is a licensed mental health professional who has expertise and experience working with children and parents going through separation and divorce. The Child Specialist brings the voice of each child into the process. They serve on the team as a neutral representative of each child’s needs and preferences in the divorce process. A Child Specialist can provide valuable assistance whether your children are minors or adults.

The child specialist performs a number of critical functions. Helping co-parents establish healthy boundaries that buffer children against toxic levels of divorce-related stress ultimately prevents children from being negatively impacted far into the future. The child specialist offers expertise in child development and the impact of divorce on children at various developmental stages. This specialist also ensures co-parents’ and the entire collaborative team prioritizes the children’s well being throughout the divorce process.

During a collaborative divorce, the child specialist meets with children to help them voice their divorce concerns. This insight offers parents greater understanding of the challenges their children are facing, and how to address these effectively. Studies affirm that healthy outcomes for children (including adult children) of divorce, are directly related to the degree they are protected from parental conflict. This licensed mental health specialist offers parental and co-parenting guidance that ensures children/adult children are heard and adequately supported. Children are given a “voice, not a choice.” Many collaborative professionals will not work without a child specialist, given their essential value to the children of divorce.

Child Specialists prepare co-parents to identify and respond effectively to their kids’ experiences. Older children also have difficulty communicating with parents about their divorce. Rather than repressing these feelings or lashing out, in such cases, child specialists offer coping tools and serve as communication facilitators between children and their parents.

No matter a child’s age, kids need a voice during a divorce, and the quality and nature of that voice matters.

During a collaborative divorce, the child specialist offers children and their parents:

Guidance and tools to navigate the multiple necessary and challenging conversations
Information that can positively impact the parenting plan
A clinical eye on the future wellbeing of children while all divorce decisions are being made
Develop a detailed Parenting Plan that will help avoid conflict moving forward.

The Role of Coaches in the Collaborative Process

Licensed Mental Health Professionals play an invaluable part in the Collaborative Divorce process to both clients and attorneys. For lawyers, the Mental Health Professional serves as an important resource by assisting them in understanding their clients’ concerns, fears, and emotional triggers. This is often a critical help in settlement negotiations by identifying psychological and emotional roadblocks to settlement. These clinicians help define a framework for more fruitful results. The Mental Health Professional may further help lawyers in realizing how their own behaviors and reactions might be causing annoyance or anger to one or both clients. They may suggest alternative approaches to issues which will be better received by clients, therefore achieving better outcomes.

For the clients, the decision to divorce typically takes place over a sequence of years. During this time, one or even both clients may have developed deeply entrenched feelings of animosity and hurt which have compromised each person’s normal way of being.

The divorce process is one of life’s most traumatic experiences. Often there are a myriad of emotions which can impair forward progress in the dissolution. Clients frequently experience feelings of: distrust, denial, anger, fear, guilt, anxiety, love, grief, revenge, sadness and depression. These feelings can naturally result in behaviors that make it challenging for a couple to continue to cohabitate during the dissolution process. Mental health professionals do not diagnose or treat clients, but utilize their training and skills to help diffuse the intensity of the clients’ psychological and emotional roadblocks. As they are especially trained to treat trauma, Mental Health Professionals provide the clients the emotional support and guidance they need to successfully navigate the dissolution process. They also educate the other team members on how to best navigate the specific emotional issues that surface for the clients. This collaboration lifts the burden solely from the financials and the lawyers, making the process more emotionally safe and cost-effective.

Our Collaborative Coaches:

Help clients develop and reinforce effective communication skills.
Increase client awareness and perspective about their couple dynamics.
Identify client trigger points and identify ways in which clients have managed conflict in the past.
Teach clients more effective conflict resolution skills.
Help clients navigate emotional crises during the collaborative process.
Help clients work through emotional road blocks throughout the process.
Prepare clients emotionally for collaborative team meetings.
Help the team understand relevant aspects of the couple’s history and dynamics in order to work with maximal attunement and success with the clients.

The Role of the Financial Specialist in the Collaborative Process

The Financial Specialist is a neutral professional in the Collaborative Divorce process. The Financial Specialist is specially trained to analyze your family’s economic circumstances and to assist both of you in reaching creative solutions to what may be difficult financial problems. By acting as a neutral, communication between you regarding immediate financial concerns and long-term goals is facilitated, making it easier for both of you to reach a mutually satisfactory and informed settlement.

The role of the Financial Specialist:

Financial Concerns: Identify and clarify the financial needs and concerns of your family and provide a thorough understanding of your family’s financial situation.
Data Analysis: Analyze data related to your family’s income, expenses, and liabilities and assist with completing the required Declarations of Disclosure.
Family Budget: Assist in creating a reasonable family budget with special attention to the financial arrangements for your children and their changing needs over time.
Settlement Scenarios: Contrast and compare different settlement scenarios, identify short-and long-term economic consequences and empower the couple to make informed financial decisions.
Financial Solutions: Assist in formulating constructive and creative solutions to complex financial problems through communication and collaboration with all members of the interdisciplinary team.
Financial Guidance: Provide ongoing practical financial guidance during the divorce process and assist with the implementation of various financial components of the couple’s final agreement, if necessary.
Marital Balance Sheet: The financial analyst collects all account statements and title documents to create a spreadsheet of marital assets and liabilities. The Marital Balance Sheet serves as a reference point throughout settlement discussions.

The Role of Our Attorneys in the Collaborative Divorce Process

The collaborative attorney is dedicated to identifying and articulating your interests and goals. We support you in cooperative settlement discussions. Our collaborative attorneys assist you in developing approaches to resolve your divorce and avoid adversarial proceedings. Our commitment to a civilized resolution of the issues you face is paramount.

Our Collaborative Attorneys:

Advise you about the law surrounding the issues in your case, including division of property, support issues and child-focused parenting plans.
Prioritize the needs of your family and children.
Sign an agreement to resolve your divorce without seeking court intervention. Our commitment to remain out of court fosters mutual respect between the clients and lawyers alongside other team professionals.
Assist in developing effective communication and negotiation skills.
Act as a negotiating partner while empowering you to make the process your own.
Demonstrate an understanding and consideration of the other person’s viewpoint.
Guide you in approaching the case in a problem-solving, constructive manner instead of a win-lose, adversarial manner.
Respect the privacy, opinions and needs of both clients.
Assist you in gathering, sharing, and analyzing information
Help develop settlement options, proposals, and evaluate consequences and limitations of possible solutions.
Prepare the Marital Settlement Agreement (MSA) and file documents with the court to obtain the Judgment of Divorce.