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Collaborative Practice in the News

Senior judge calls for end to acrimonious divorces
Frances Gibb, Legal Editor
October 15, 2008

A High Court judge says couples should avoid the example of Heather Mills and Sir Paul McCartney and settle out of court

Heather Mills: a senior High Court judge has urged divorcing couples to avoid acrimonious splits and settle out of court

A leading judge on called last night for an end to acrimonious splits such as the recent divorce of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills - and a move instead to out of court settlements.

Mr Justice Coleridge, a senior High Court family judge, said that five years ago, only a handful of lawyers were using the American-style approach called "collaborative law".

But there are now 1250 family lawyers, including 300 in London, in England and Wales who are trained in the innovative method that avoids gladiatorial-style combat in the courts between spouses.

The approach, which has developed with great "speed and succes", represented a "a complete change in cultural approach and that is not easily achieved," he said.

The judge told more than 100 lawyers gathered to celebrate the 5th anniversary of collaborative law in the UK" that it also meant a new mindset. "We lawyers are by nature and training adversarial and sometimes aggressive." That was in a way inevitable because clients wanted support and to be told "they will come out all right, that they will win," he said.

But although separation and divorce were "always horrendously stressful - some say worse than the death of a spouse", to use the new process to ensure the minimum of distress was "hugely rewarding and a great deal more worthwhile than battering the other side into submission or fighting to conclusion".

James Stewart, family partner at Manches, said: "The McCartney divorce was perhaps one of the most extreme examples of an acrimonious break-up." He added: "But the publicity it generated obscured that the fact that throughout the UK and in London in particular family lawyers and separating couples rae striving to reduce acrimony in divorce and relationship breakdown."

The approach was a "great idea" to "reduce the sort of acrimony all too common in high-profile cases where too-big egos are involved".

Under the new process, the spouses and their lawyers meet to agree settlements at a fraction of the cost of a full-blow courttoom battle. If the negotations fail, the couples have to start all over again with new lawyers.

The negotiations by trained lawyers are in private and go at the client's pace. They are suitable for big-money divorces as well as ordinary ones. But the common factor is that they are carried out outside the courtroom.

Other experts are employed including financial advisors, family counsellors and others to help the couple work out ways to agree arrangements over children and cope with the "emotional fall-out".