Interested in Resolving Your Dispute Through Collaboration?
“My joy was boundless. I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find
out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized the true
function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so
indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of
my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of
hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby-not even money, certainly not my
soul.”
– Mohandas Gandhi (1957).’
Collaborative law, according to the preamble of the 2010 draft of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act, “is a voluntary, contractually based alternative dispute resolution process for parties who seek to negotiate a resolution of their matter rather than having a ruling imposed upon them by a court or arbitrator.” This draft document offers an excellent overview of collaborative law, its applications, its practitioners, its strengths, and its limitations. For anyone considering resolving a dispute through this approach, I recommend downloading and reading it. Alabama is one of seventeen states so far to adopt a version of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act.
Collaborative law is somewhat similar to mediation, in that it requires voluntary disclosure and results in an agreement created by the parties. But there is no mediator, and the attorneys representing the parties are both usually present during negotiations, assisting the parties in working on crafting their own agreement. At the outset, the parties and their attorneys execute an agreement which requires the attorneys to withdraw from the dispute if the parties are unable to resolve their differences without litigation.
Most discussions of collaborative law focus on its use in domestic relations law, and most of the early practitioners of this style of resolution have indeed been specialists in that field. But collaborative law offers benefits in many other areas of legal disputes — probate law, construction law, shareholder disputes in small and medium-sized businesses, minority shareholder oppression matters, business partnership dissolutions, and wrongful discharge claims. Collaborative law solutions should be considered in any dispute where the parties would like to avoid the expense and the public exposure of litigation while also attempting to preserve value — in a business, in family property holdings, in the care and support for children. Like mediation, collaborative law offers parties the benefit of crafting their own resolution to their dispute rather than having a resolution imposed upon them.
Steven Gregory is a member of the International Association of Collaborative Law Professionals, the Collaborative Law Committee of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Section of the American Bar Association, the Collaborative Law Committee of the Birmingham Bar Association, and the Birmingham Collaborative Alliance.