Who are Collaborative Professionals?

As an attorney with 41 years of experience, I have dedicated my legal practice to Collaborative Law. I am now a member of the Sacramento Collaborative Practice Group, a team of collaborative lawyers, coaches, financial experts, and child experts. Collaborative lawyers like me are all experienced family lawyers. Each party to a Collaborative Divorce or Termination of a Domestic Partnership will have his or her collaborative lawyer. Collaborative coaches are experienced mental health professionals and each party will have their own collaborative coach. A collaborative child expert is a mental health professional specializing in child development. The children or child will have one collaborative child expert. A collaborative financial expert is a specialist in financial planning and matrimonial property issues and the couple will have one collaborative financial expert. In addition to being skilled practitioners in their fields, each professional has had both collaborative and mediation training.

What is Collaborative Training?

Collaborative training is designed to teach professionals that by working together rather than in opposition to each other more just and humane agreements become possible. We are training to listen deeply to each other’s concerns, to ask respectful questions and to gently encourage the most thoughtful and caring settlements possible, settlements that take into consideration everyone’s interests and concerns.

What is Mediation Training?

Mediation training for collaborative professionals is designed to teach them how to work in a non-adversarial manner. The training prepares the professional to help couples who are in conflict separate out the problems they are experiencing from the personalities involved in the disputes. Mediation training encourages parties who are feeling demoralized to become stronger and more competent. Mediation training encourages respectful questioning of taken for granted assumptions about the way things appear and encourages parties to rethink these assumptions.