The new way to divorce: splitting up without a judge
The divorce wars had pretty much done in Stuart Webb. After 20 years as a family law litigator in Minneapolis, he was burned out, demoralized by the siege mentality of his job, and searching for an escape from the ugliness of divorce and the damage he saw being done to families–especially children–as bitter courtroom battles played out.
"I had to get out to save myself," Webb says. But instead of abandoning divorce law, he decided to transform it, and in 1990 he came up with a new way for lawyers to help couples split without destroying each other and their children.
Webb called his creation "collaborative law," and in recent years it has become one of the fastest-growing methods by which disputes are settled outside the courtroom. His formula is deceptively simple. Divorcing couples and their lawyers committed to the method sit down together to negotiate terms of the split with one overriding understanding: If talks break down, the couple will have to find new lawyers to take their dispute to court or any other venue.
The idea of a lawyer withdrawing his or her counsel if settlement talks fail is foreign to most litigators, says Ronald Ousky, a Minneapolis lawyer who has written a book with Webb about the strategy they both embrace.
"At first, it didn't sink in even with me–is withdrawal really necessary?" Ousky said. "But that is the radical shift–it's what puts meat on the bone."
"When you take court out of the picture, people start to behave differently," he said. "It's the difference between sitting in a room and settling with a gun, or sitting in a room and settling while the guns are blocks away." The method has been so successful it is being adapted for use in situations ranging from civil conflicts to medical malpractice claims and has spread to Europe and Australia. There are now an estimated 10,000 collaborative divorce lawyers around the world, including about 150 in Minnesota.
Webb and Ousky sat down with U.S. News this week in Washington to talk about their method. They were in town to lead collaborative-law training sessions and sign their recently published book, The Collaborative Way to Divorce: The Revolutionary Method That Results in Less Stress, Lower Costs and Happier Kids–Without Going to Court.
On how the collaborative method with lawyers trained in the process differs from straight-up mediation.
Webb: Mediation is neutral. The mediator, the person working for the client, is a neutral. In collaboration, the client has a lawyer supporting him or her in the room. Mediation decisions are often made in a vacuum, and some mediators say the hardest thing for them is when one of the parties has made a decision that isn't a good one, and the only thing [the mediator] can do is suggest that the party check with his or her lawyer.
Ousky: Our goal is to have a mediation-style settlement but have somebody at the table on your side. If you walk into one of our four-way meetings [the couple and their respective lawyers], it might be hard to tell who's representing whom. But we're not neutrals, and after the meeting lawyers will sit down with their own clients and make sure they understand the law. There's someone watching out for your interests.
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