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I don’t want to age myself but I’ve been around long enough to remember the traditional divorce process and I used to say well, they call them the halls of justice because that’s where all the decisions were made. The decisions weren’t always made in the courtroom because the lawyers were frantically discussing things in the hallway trying to reach an agreement. But prior to that, they had no other process to help them do that. I recall a judge that used to look at his whole docket for the week and then he’d call the lawyers in one case at a time and try to mediate from his desk to get a settlement because he recognized that calling that first witness wasn’t a good idea, and this was quite a while ago.
So when we grew to the point that we did mediation this began the true steps, I think, that were healthy for families. And then for mediation realizing we most probably had to start sooner than after we’d done all of our litigation work to try to put our families on a different track and collaborative is the response to that. I’ve been very blessed to meet some of the early people in collaborative, Stu Webb, of course, is one and to spend a lot of time visiting with them to understand where they were coming from. And the truth is Stu Webb was standing in the hallway trying to settle a case when this idea came to him. And so I feel very blessed as well that I’m in the states that I’m in who’ve taken this and worked very hard to develop it.
Dallas, TX Family Law Attorney, Barbara Cole, talks about the main difference between collaborative divorce and traditional divorce.