The Benefits of Collaborative Family Law

Collaborative Family Law in Tampa, FL

The process of you choosing in your marriage is going to have a reaching impact on your life, in all of these ways custodial, financial and emotional. Depending upon where you live you can have many options of mediation, collaborative family law or collaborative practice, traditional negotiation or litigation. But you might be wondering just what collaborative family law is. Collaborative family law also known as CFL is one process option along the range of options available for the termination of your marriage. On one end of the options is a couple sitting down at the kitchen table and reaching an agreement on all of their issues by themselves, on the other end of the system there is traditional litigation which requires that an outside party make decisions concerning the termination of the marriage.

There has been a considerable body of research that is focused on divorce and how divorce affects children, and in virtually every study the conclusion is the same, high levels of parental conflict are toxic to the children. When it comes to collaborative family law, it’s meant to help you focus your energies on the good of the divorce. Therefore if your marriage must end, then CFL wants to help you work toward a relationship that will allow you and your children to have a healthy relationship as you co parent them. Postdivorce CFL is hoping to have good communication, protect the emotional mental health of your children and protect against the financial erosion of the marital estate.

Reading that as you might believe that such a divorce would be impossible, because the media portrays divorce to always end in litigation. However, your collaborative family law in Tampa, FL lawyers are going to have a lot of experience in dealing with collaborative family law. You might be afraid, divorce is often scary because you are changing your life ultimately hopefully for the better, but you could be worried about your children or your family. You could be worried about the financial circumstances that you were going to be left with after the divorce. That’s okay, divorce is scary. It’s even scarier when you have to come up with parenting arrangements, whether your lifestyle can be maintained, and no assets or liabilities will be divided between you and your ex-spouse.

In a CFL case a husband and wife are going to be represented by an attorney who is trained in interest-based negotiation. Your attorney is also going to understand the structure of the CFL case and interpersonal conflict resolution skills. Collaborative family law in Tampa, FL depends on the clients and the attorney is entering into a contract called a participation agreement.

The participation agreement is important to review with your attorney, understand the terms of that agreement, and feel comfortable with the terms as they were presented. This agreement provides that each of you is represented by your own lawyer, even if most of the working of the divorce proceedings is done in a four-way meeting.

A good collaborative family lawyer, such as the ones available at The McKinney Law Group, is going to be able to walk you through your four-way meetings with ease.