Mediation & Collaborative Divorce Attorney in Dallas, Texas
What is collaborative divorce and what are the weaknesses of this process?
What is collaborative divorce and what are the weaknesses of this process?
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collaborative law in Texas and mind you
I’m not trained in collaborative law so
I’ve never been a big believer in it but
the collaborative law process is is
basically where each party has each
party has their own attorney and they
have signed a contract and submit
something to the court saying that hey
we are going to try to reach a
resolution through the collaborative
collaborative process so so what does
that include well they’re going to hire
one set of experts so you have one one
financial expert and one kid expert in
whatever experts you need and then
through a series of meetings they try to
reach a resolution to everything now the
problem that I have with the
collaborative process is that he or she
who has the money is the person who
controls the process in my opinion and
the problem with that is the hammer in
collaborative is that if you can’t reach
an agreement
everything is scrapped and you have to
start all over in the process with new
lawyers as you go into the litigation
process so all the money you spent all
the work you did all the work that the
kids did all of that goes by the wayside
so that’s why you see I think people do
a lot more of what I would call
cooperative and that’s where you try to
do some things in a collaborative
setting but you’re not taking you know
you’re not taking the ability a way of
one party to tell the other party to go
pound sand that we’re going to court
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Dallas high-net-worth divorce attorney, Mark Scroggins, talks about the concept of collaborative divorce and the specific weaknesses in this process. He explains that collaborative law in Texas is a process where each party has their own attorney and signs a contract agreeing to attempt to resolve the case outside of traditional litigation. They submit this agreement to the court and often hire a single set of experts—financial, child-related, or otherwise—to assist in reaching a resolution through a series of meetings.
However, he expresses skepticism about collaborative law. In his view, the party with the greater financial resources often ends up controlling the process. The biggest drawback, he notes, is that if the parties fail to reach an agreement, the entire process is scrapped. All the time, effort, and money invested—including work done by the children in evaluations or assessments—is essentially lost, and the case must start over in traditional litigation with new attorneys.
Because of these limitations, he observes that many people lean more toward a cooperative approach. In that approach, parties attempt to resolve issues collaboratively without giving one side the ability to dictate the process or threaten to abandon it entirely if they don’t get their way.
