Texas Collaborative Law Blog

Collaborative Law is a dispute resolution system that permits the parties to a divorce or family law issue to settle out of court in a respectful, private and mutually agreeable manner. The parties each have their own attorneys, but they agree at the outset to not go to court. This blog is set up to provide information about the Texas approach to Collaborative Law.
URL: http://texascollaborativelaw.blogspot.com/

Improving Creativity
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Working in Collaborative Law, one of the great joys of the process is creating new solutions to problems that the parties may have felt were impossible to resolve. I recently ran across an article from Scientific American magazine that dealt with creativity and gave some encouraging ideas on how to increase creativity in people. You can read the article and you may get some ideas that will help some aspect of your life. As I read the article, I thought about how it could be applied in the Collaborative Law context. Here are some possible ways to increase creativity in Collaborative cases by temporarily changing your reality to work from a different point of view. (These are just my creations and are not based on science or even from suggestions in the article, but I invite you to take a look and have a little fun with it.) Change some variables. On children's issues, you might try changing the number of children you are working with, or change the schedules that...Read More
Collaborative Prenuptial Agreements
Sunday, Feb 28, 2010
Our good friend Sam Hasler from Indiana has a brief post in his blog today about using Collaborative Law as the process for creating a prenuptial agreement. His blog, "Sam Hasler's Indiana Divorce Family Law Blog" is always a source for new ideas and good approaches for dealing important family issues. Here's what he wrote about prenuptial agreements and Collaborative Law: "From Family Law Week comes Collaborative prenuptial agreements find favour "According to The Law Society’s Gazette, a rising number of clients contemplating marriage are asking for prenuptial agreements to be prepared using the collaborative law model. The report records a shift in attitude among clients who would prefer to adopt a more consensual approach to agreeing a pre-nuptial agreement rather than employ the more traditional, oppositional method of negotiation." I have previously written about using Collaborative Law for prenuptial agreements for professional athletes and using it...Read More
Get a Second Opinion on Using Collaborative Law if....
Saturday, Jan 30, 2010
Choosing the right attorney is a critical step in using Collaborative Law to help you resolve a family law issue. In any kind of legal matter, you have to carefully select your legal advisor and advocate, but with Collaborative Law, extra care is necessary. Collaborative Law attorneys receive additional training so they can learn new skills and a new mental approach to handling cases. We call it a "paradigm shift". We realize that Collaborative Law requires a different orientation by the lawyer. It's not just a question of whether we can negotiate effectively. Our whole approach to a case is radically different and lawyers who haven't been to at least a 2-day basic training in Collaborative Law don't have a clue about what we are really doing or how we approach cases differently. Unfortunately, some lawyers who are not trained will claim to be Collaborative lawyers. Some do it because they are genuinely interested in the process and have been persuaded of its value by things...Read More