You have decided to approach your divorce from a collaborative stance. Here is how the process might go.
- If you are in the formal collaborative process as outlined in RCW 7.77
This means you have signed a participation agreement. You have likely held your first meeting where you outlined what this process will look like.
What does this first meeting look like and how is it different from a traditional approach divorce in Washington state?
Traditional Divorce Approach:
In a traditional divorce, your initial meeting would look a lot different. The whole mindset is different. In this meeting you might advise your lawyer on what you want. You will disclose all real and personal property you owned both with and without your spouse, retirement accounts, and your debts. You will also discuss the number of children you have, ages, and your ideal parenting plan. These might be general concepts not a formal parenting plan or asset division plan. Importantly, though, your lawyer will look at this from the perspective of how the law might support your position.
Collaborative Approach:
While there are similarities in the initial meeting with traditional approach, such as sharing all the necessary information about children, property, and debts, the goals are different. Your lawyer, of course, will be advocating for you and what is best for you but this might include what can accomplish your needs while still accommodating the other party. The lawyer will be looking at what the laws allow and require while also taking into account what will best for your life as a whole. In other words, the focus is on how to solve the issues between the parties rather than how the law might support a “win” for one party.
In addition, the initial meeting will include your soon-to-be-ex and their attorney. You will be openly sharing all of your positions on child custody, assets, and debts with that person present, and they will also be sharing their position with you present. This can be challenging and relieving at the same time. In one sense, it might be frustrating to hear how they think they should have more time with child than you or they think they should get the house and you shouldn’t. But also, you both openly know where you each stand and it allows for you to develop a solution based plan that will meet both of your needs.
In a traditional divorce, you would take the frustration about the different positions you hold and use it to “fight” in a court to “win” on your position. This might sound nice as an idea but in reality, usually no one wins. The judge may or may not find your position convincing and then you have wasted time and money fighting for something that could have simply been worked out between the parties. And its particularly, problematic, when children are involved because you gave to spend the next fill-in-the-blank years co-parenting with an unhappy co-parent all the while the child is witnessing or at the very least sensing the tension.
Also, slightly different than the traditional approach divorce, in your initial meeting you will go over an overall game plan for the collaborative approach such as how often you will meet, what will be accomplished in each meeting, payment of professionals fees, and other issues. There are also will likely be a neutral mental health professional present to help lead the meeting.
As the process goes on:
As mentioned above, in the collaborative approach you will have a number (of your choice which may be based on finances) of meetings. In each meeting you will have an agenda and your goal will be to work out issues such as property division or child custody. At the end of each meeting, you will have hopefully been able to come away with a plan that meets your interests not your wants. For example, you might have a position like, I want the Cadillac. Your interest might just be that you need a reliable car. Perhaps you and the other party can work out a solution which meets your interest, you might not get the Cadillac but you will have a reliable car.
In a traditional approach divorce, you might have meetings with the other party but usually you will see the other party in court. First, for temporary orders, where you each can ask the court to divide property and/or award spousal support and child custody while the divorce is pending. These are usually not agreed upon before the hearings and can be contentious. Most of the time both parties don’t exactly get everything they wanted because after all it is a third-party judge (usually commissioner in Washington state) deciding what will happen.
- The process in a non-formal collaborative approach
You aren’t required to use a formal collaborative approach and you aren’t required to use a court process. You can mix and match. You might decided that you are unable to afford a traditional approach, so you don’t want to go with a formal collaborative approach. However, you still want to collaborative with the other party. This might mean you going to the other party and asking them how they would like to see the property divided and the parenting plan look. You can then take this information to your lawyer and work with your lawyer to come up with a plan that works for you and then present this plan to the other party. Your lawyer could also reach out to the other party, so long as the other party is not represented, if they are the lawyer can reach out to the other party’s lawyer instead. You could also have a series of meetings like in the formal collaborative approach with both lawyers where you try to reach agreements.
Usually in Washington state, if both parties reach a reasonable agreement and ultimately present final agreed orders, the court will sign-off. There are some cases, particularly with children where the court might not sign-off, but these would be specific situations that would require consultation with a lawyer to determine if that’s likely.
The resolution of these cases will be discussed in Part 3 of this series.