Montreal Gazette Article Highlights Collaborative Benefits

Every year, Collaborative Divorce grows and we believe that this year will be no different, as family law continues to move further and further away from destructive battles in court and more towards productive collaboration. In a recent article in the Montreal Gazette, Michelle Lalonde did an incredible job of highlighting both the Collaborative Process and how it can impact families, legal professionals, and the family law landscape as a whole as we move into the new year. We highly recommend taking a few minutes to read through the article in full.

It’s an in-depth look at a lot of areas of Collaborative Divorce, specifically in Quebec, but we really like how a quote from Shaina Bronfen breaks down the benefit of having to find new lawyers to go to court, should collaborative negotiations fail:

“The clients don’t want to have to train new lawyers from scratch to go to court because that involves expense, as well as the massive undertaking of document examination and explanations. … For the attorneys, they will lose that client unless they are sincere about their desire to settle the file. So in a collaborative divorce negotiation, attorneys don’t posture the way they sometimes do in the non-collaboratively designed negotiations.

“You won’t hear a collaborative attorney say to the other one: ‘If your client doesn’t come up with another $50,000 to buy my client out of the house, we will see you in court.’ You won’t hear that, because it’s in no one’s interest to go there, because you need to settle the file. We all need this file to be settled.”

Read the entire Montreal Gazette Article “Collaborative divorce or mediation can help couples avoid court battle”.