COLLABORATIVE FAMILY LAWYER

Collaborative Divorce in Boulder & Colorado Statewide

Don’t get sucked into a legal battle and let divorce destroy your family, thinking there is no alternative. Even if working together in mediation is not possible or appropriate, a Conscious Family collaborative divorce attorney can come onboard as collaborative divorce counsel, or as your strategic representative, helping you gain a clear understanding of your legal rights and negotiating powerfully on your behalf.

The Collaborative Divorce Model

With the collaborative divorce model, each spouse retains an attorney. Then, they all meet together, along with a neutral financial analyst and a neutral facilitator. The goal is to create a marital settlement agreement that works for everyone. All of our lawyers at Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation in Boulder, CO are specially trained in the Collaborative Divorce process.

Our collaborative divorce framework makes participating lawyers contractually forbidden from representing their respective clients at trial. We feel this makes for an environment in which everyone is highly motivated to arrive at a workable settlement and avoid the necessity of the spouses having to start over from scratch.

Here are some more resources about the Collaborative Divorce process, and help evaluating whether to pursue a Collaborative Divorce.

Strategic Advisement

Sometimes a more collaborative approach isn’t possible from the start, or it doesn’t work once you give it a try. In that instance, we also offer strategic advisement for our clients.

Our team at Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation can help you navigate the confusion of divorce, including filing the appropriate documentation and negotiating with other parties for your settlement.

Navigating the conventional divorce process can be confusing and fraught with peril. Conscious Family lawyers can employ strength and integrity through divorce negotiations, or simply as a consultant in the background, as appropriate.

Focused on Empowering You to Determine the Outcome

While traditional lawyers approach their representation of you with an eye toward having the issues decided by a judge in a trial, Conscious Family attorneys are focused on achieving positive outcomes out of court. This empowers you to determine the outcomes for your family. When we come onboard as your strategic representatives, you can trust that we will work to:

Identify all key issues
Make sure you understand all dimensions of your case
Help you develop a strategy for optimal outcomes, while keeping relational damage to a minimum, even in the face of aggressive opposing lawyers
Execute an effective strategy out of court, with you in the driver’s seat

Committed to maximizing resources

Conscious Family attorneys are focused on minimizing material, emotional, and energetic costs to all parties in order to preserve family resources via mediation. We will sit down and give you an honest assessment of your options and help you understand the costs associated with each. Traditional lawyers may feel justified in fanning feelings of hurt, betrayal and blame. While this may seem supportive in the moment, it is only the lawyer who benefits through escalating conflict, by increasing his or her fees. Meanwhile, the divorced parties are left to pick up the pieces of their shattered familial relationships and depleted marital estate.

A Powerful Negotiator

If you elect to have a Conscious Family lawyer negotiate on your behalf, we are mindful about the emotional impact on everyone involved whenever lawyers enter a dispute. While traditional lawyers tend to be unaware of the way their warlike language increases conflict, we expertly advocate for you without needlessly inflaming the situation, employing mature communication skills to facilitate resolution of disputes.

If negotiations fail and trial before a judge is unavoidable, we seamlessly transition you to a highly skilled trial lawyer who can ensure that you will be given the highest considerations afforded by our justice system.

The Conscious Family™ Approach

A less adversarial process

Many people erroneously believe that divorce has to be an adversarial process. This probably comes from well-meaning but mistaken friends and family, as well as stereotypes in movies and television shows. In fact, divorce can be a collaborative process with a reduced emotional footprint. We encourage this method whenever possible, as it has many benefits:

Less emotional trauma for all involved
Less costly
Faster
More flexible and in the spouses’ control
Private

Additionally, collaborative divorce results in agreements that are more likely to endure. This is the polar opposite of highly contested divorces, which make enemies of the two separating partners and often result in problems with the marital settlement. Going back to court time and time again to rehash issues like spousal support, child custody, and the division of property keeps you from moving on with your lives and only creates more emotional distress for children and other family members involved.

Reduce the Emotional Fallout from Your Divorce

Divorce can be one of the most stressful experiences in life, for the two separating spouses and for family members caught up in the conflict. With collaborative divorce or strategic legal representation from Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation, however, you can minimize the emotional fallout of divorce on yourself and those around you.

We facilitate your working together as much as possible to make divorce less stressful and more of a mutual agreement process. But if collaboration is not possible, we can also provide legal services to protect your rights, including negotiating assertively on your part and even referring you to legal representation for family court.

Empowering you

Our primary goal is to empower you to have the best possible outcome from your divorce. This doesn’t mean “winning,” as with traditional adversarial divorce methods that usually lead to a long court battle. Instead, we want you to stay out of litigation whenever possible.

When you work out your divorce settlement on your own, without a judge dictating the future, you are more likely to get an agreement you feel good about. You’re less likely to experience stress, and your family is less likely to feel caught in the middle of a conflict as well. Our process in this includes:

Identifying the issues that are important to you and others involved
Helping you understand the aspects of your case
Creating strategies for optimum outcomes and minimizing damage, even when other lawyers are participating
Keeping you in the driver’s seat whenever possible

Maximizing resources

It’s sad, but it’s a fact that many attorneys in family law fan the flames of conflict and aggression between divorcing parties. They may emphasize betrayal, blame, and past hurts to keep spouses fighting rather than working together for a collaborative divorce. Of course, this puts more money in their pockets, when divorce is expensive enough as it is.

At Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation, we understand divorce is costly, both in terms of money and emotionally shattered family relationships. We help you maximize both of those resources by working to keep expenses reasonable for your budget and striving not to antagonize spouses who are already hurting.

Providing powerful negotiation

Even when clients elect to have us negotiate on their behalf, we try to work as collaboratively as possible. We have trained and developed skills to negotiate assertively but still within our ethos of mature communication, alternative dispute resolution, and conflict de-escalation.

As attorneys specializing in family law, we also make sure your rights are always protected in any divorce negotiations. We review all documents for accuracy and enforceability, and we advise you about any aspects of your settlement that don't appear to be in your best interest. Common issues we help resolve include:

Division of marital property (Colorado is an equitable distribution state)
Spousal support
Child custody and visitation
Child support
Co-parenting
Disposition of pensions and healthcare benefits
Care of pets

There are times when our approach doesn’t work with the other party. Negotiations can fail, and there are things that come to light that can’t be negotiated, such as issues involving child safety. In these cases, we are happy to refer our clients to a skilled divorce trial lawyer.

Reach Out to Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation for Help with Your Collaborative Divorce or Family Lawyer needs!

Divorce doesn’t have to leave your kids traumatized, your bank accounts empty, or your mind and body reeling from the stress. Try a different way with collaborative divorce or strategic representation at Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation in Boulder. We have made it our goal to change the way people divorce. We service many cities all over Colorado including Denver.

Schedule a free introduction call to learn more about how we can support you.