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Episode 17 Buy Episode

Stop, Collaborate and Listen – Collaborative Law

Law as stated: 29 May 2020 What is this? This episode was published and is accurate as at this date.
Collaborative law is changing the way disputes are resolved, by emphasising being candid over being adversarial – we speak with a collaboratively-trained lawyer and a collaborative law coach about their experiences.
Professional Skills Professional Skills
29 May 2020
Leona Bennett and Shelby Timmins
Southern Waters Legal
1 hour = 1 CPD point
How does it work?
What area(s) of law does this episode consider?The use of collaborative law in Australia, particularly in family law.
Why is this topic relevant?Collaborative law, also known as collaborative practice, is a method of dispute resolution, focused on resolutions, not entitlements. It side-steps the adversarial legal system and instead invites lawyers and their clients to work together to reach a solution that works for both parties.

Collaborative law is particularly suited to family law, but it  could become a cost effective and quicker form of dispute resolution in any sort of relationship-based area, including for Family Provisions Act claims and shareholder disputes.

What legislation is considered in this episode?

 

1. Family Law Act 1975 (Cth).

Particularly section 60I which mandates that parties must attempt alternate dispute resolution before applying for Part VII order, that is a parenting order. Section 60I(9) states that the exception to this is where there has been, or there is a risk of, family violence or child abuse.

2. Family Law Rules 2004 (Cth)

Rule 13.04 requires the full and frank disclosure of parties to a financial case of their financial circumstances.

What are the main points?
  • Collaborative practice is a form of alternative dispute resolution.  The parties, their lawyers and experts enter into a formal agreement to focus on settlement rather than litigation. The parties then meet face-to-face to discuss their respective interests, rather than legal entitlements should the matter proceed to litigation.
  • In regards to family law, the advantages of collaborative practice are that it:
    • provides a formal structure focused on positive child focused communications;
    • provides legal advocacy support during collaboration;
    • removes the immediate threat of litigation;
    • encourages parties to develop a trusting alliance for future parenting;
    • focuses on interests, not positions;
    • minimises the time required of lawyers;
    • utilises the expertise of independent experts.
  • Collaborative law can help families achieve a quicker dispute resolution without the need to potentially wait years for a court date.
  • Collaborative law relies on a more human, emotional approach to discussing the issues at hand that is more suited to the often sensitive nature of a family separation.
  • Collaborative lawyers must cease to act for clients where the matter proceeds to trial.
What are the practical takeaways?
  • Collaborative law has been practised in the USA and Canada prior to adoption in Australia; in those jurisdictions it began in family law but has since been used to resolve medical, employment and other civil disputes.
  • Collaborative law is often compared to mediation; however mediation does not preclude parallel court proceedings in the same way that collaborative law does.
  • Mediation is often based on positional bargaining where the parties overestimate their needs and interests; this differs from interests-based negotiations which looks at the underlying interests of each party and focuses on solutions that meet the needs of both parties.
  • Collaborative law is based on ‘four-way meetings’ where the parties and their lawyers meet and receive advice, exchange information and communicate their respective interests openly in front of each other.
  • Keeping an agenda is beneficial in collaborative law meetings and discussions to readdress what the parties’ ultimate goals are and to ensure the discussion remains focused on the issues important to the parties.
  • Coaches, or facilitators, help the parties and their lawyers to communicate in an open dialogue and binds the interdisciplinary team together.
  • Financial neutrals, such as accountants, are professionals that can be used in the collaborative process to assist with presenting, budgeting and projecting financial information concerning the issues between the parties. Other neutrals could include psychologists, mediators, social workers or child consultants.
Show notesRelationships Australia NSW (RANSW) Collaborative Practice Training Course

Australian Association of Collaborative Professionals (AACP) Membership

Clarrisa Rayward Collaborative Law Course

Collaborative Professionals NSW’s article ‘Mythbusting – Agendas in the collaborative process’

Collaborative Professionals NSW – Become a volunteer note-taker

David Turner:

 

 

 

 

 

1:00

 

 

 

Hello and welcome to Hearsay, a podcast about Australian laws and lawyers for the Australian legal profession, my name is David Turner. As always, this podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, a boutique commercial law firm making complex simple.

Just a quick note before we begin, the episode of Hearsay you’re about to listen to was recorded in the midst of the coronavirus crisis and as a result of social distancing measures we had to conduct this interview over remote technology such as Zoom or Google Meet, the audio quality might be a little different than what you were expecting. Still we think it’s pretty good in the circumstances and we hope you enjoy the episode.

The adversarial system of litigation is a tradition with a history measured in centuries. It’s the basis of the dispute resolution training that all lawyers in Australia have received, and when a client asks the question, “what can I do about this seemingly intractable disagreement”, the answer that first comes to mind for most of us is, “go to court”.

That is, until now. An increasing number of lawyers, particularly in the family law field, have started approaching the resolution of disputes with a completely different philosophy, one that is less adversarial and more candid.

Joining me today on Hearsay to talk about collaborative law is Leona Bennett from Southern Waters Legal. Leona, thank you so much for joining us on Hearsay.

Leona Bennett:Thank you very much, thanks for having me.
DT:Now tell me about collaborative law as if I had known nothing about it before today, what is collaborative law?
LB:

2:00

Collaborative law is a different way of practising and I practise it in particular family law, but it’s a way where you commit at the outset for the lawyers and the parties not to engage in court proceedings so it’s very, very different from the traditional path of lawyers having a threat of litigation or talking about taking the matter to court. Right at the outset you commit both the lawyers on the party’s by signing a contract not to go to court and in addition to that, its resolution focused as opposed to entitlement focused. So, in family law for example it’s very much about how can the family resolve their issues in dispute and move forward where they might want to co-parent or they might want to coexist in a different way, as opposed to a client who might come in and say tell me all my entitlements and the best that I can receive in this situation. So it’s a change of mindset in the way that you approach your resolution.
DT:And collaborative law has really originated in family law, hasn’t it?
LB:

3:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

4:00

So it originated overseas and there’s been a huge focus on family law. We are seeing it branch into other areas at the moment which is very exciting, but I would say it has its dominance, in Australia, in particular in family law, and it can really divide the practitioners in that some people could feel quite strongly about it, and other lawyers it’s the last thing they want to engage in.

TIP: To find the origin of collaborative law, we have to travel back in time and around the globe to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1990. It was then and there that experienced family lawyer and mediator, Stu Webb, began to despise practicing law, coming to the office each day with a sense of dread. This led him to experiment with this different approach, working with his client and the other side around the table in a four-person team. Stu found that the approach of collaborative law allowed lawyers to be focused on negotiations without the constant threat of going to court sitting in the back of their minds. He also found it allowed lawyers to actually learn what works in settlement discussions, because the usual crutch of terminating those discussions and going back to court wasn’t available. There is continuity between settlement and processing the final dissolution. (This is usually not the case in mediation with the resulting problem of the lawyers not liking the mediated settlement.  Collaborative law was then brought to Australia in September 2002 by Justice Robert Benjamin of the Family Court.

DT:I can imagine that it would divide people because it’s really a philosophical difference in terms of how you practise right? I mean you’ve said it’s the difference between rights and resolution or a rights focus and a resolution focus. I can imagine that would really rub some lawyers the wrong way?
LB:

 

 

5:00

 

Oh absolutely. I recall last year speaking to a practitioner who has been around for a very long time and we were having some open dialogue about how we could assist an elderly couple who had been married for 50 years and were separating. And I would have thought it was an ideal matter to deal with collaboratively and his position was well I don’t deal in that airy-fairy part of the law. He was very open to getting a room and to mediate which isn’t that far removed from the concept of collaboration, but the thoughts of changing the mindset and the philosophy he just couldn’t get his head around it all. In fact he called it mumbo jumbo and a variety of other things on the phone, so it certainly has an ideological shift I think in a lawyer’s brain with the way that they practise. And practising it myself, I have to practise differently when I engage in a collaborative matter. And I’ve seen lawyers when I’ve had collaborative matters slip in and out of the different personas in the way that they approach it. So it is challenging.
DT:

 

Well I can imagine you would probably need quite a bit of training to do that. I mean it’s not something that you can switch overnight. I think we’ve been trained from an undergraduate degree at university all the way through our on the job professional training to be very rights focused and to be adversarial because our court system is adversarial. How do you cultivate the collaborative persona?
LB:

6:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

7:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8:00

It’s a really good question I think it has a lot to do with the way you’re intrinsically driven as well – I think some lawyers naturally align themselves to collaborative law. There is training you specifically have to do to be a collaborative lawyer.

TIP: Collaborative law training is offered by a number of organisations in NSW, including Relationships NSW. To become a member of the Australian Association of Collaborative Professionals, one must have completed no fewer than three days of collaborative training.

Lots of people become collaboratively trained but don’t practise it. What I see happen for practise groups to pop up, and I’m really lucky I am part of the Sutherland Shire practise group and we have a lot of members in our group who are similar minded, so what happens is we springboard off each other and we introduce matters to each other. And I think that’s what differentiates it because you’ve got similarly minded practitioners who all think that this is a better way for families to resolve their matter. It’s about educating quite a bit so not just educating young lawyers coming through that it’s an option, but also educating the public as lots of people don’t know about it, or what it is, or how it differs and why they might benefit from it. Probably one of the big differences with it is that, and I think probably why we’ve had a lot of success in Sutherland Shire with it of recent is that we engage coaches and the coaches are often a neutral individual who introduces the concept to the parties in the first instance so locally we’ve got a couple of coaches who clients might meet because they don’t want to meet with lawyers. The coach might say to them look your matter is actually really suited to this because the way you both spoke to me about how you want to extract yourself from this separation is that you want to remove yourself with dignity and you want to co-parent and you want to be able to communicate it at a level that allows you to function beyond this. Those coaches then sometimes each introduce the parties to collaboratively trained lawyers.

TIP: Now coaches, or facilitators as they’re sometimes referred to, are used to assist parties and their lawyers to communicate and they help parties through the unfamiliar process of collaborative law. Coaches can help with tasks that you wouldn’t usually expect a mediator to help with, like managing stress or supporting parties who may find it difficult to speak up for themselves. A collaborative law coach will be joining us in the second half of the episode to talk more about their role.

But it is a real skill and I’ve seen many a time when I’ve been in it, lawyers slip out of the mode and slip back to the position of being entitlement based, but also being strategic because you take the strategy out and that itself is a little bit different. You don’t go into a matter with the complete strategic approach you might otherwise do.

DT:Because you’re not planning for future litigation.
LB:

9:00

Exactly and you’re planning for the family as a whole, so it involves everybody’s dialogue. It involves the collaboration of both parties, not just what your client wants to achieve.
DT:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I want to come back to that idea of planning for the whole family I suppose, but before I do, you mentioned that often clients will come to a coach who then might tell them about the concept of collaborative law and perhaps introduce them to solicitors who are trained in that area. I imagine when that happens your client is already committed to the idea of collaborative law and it’s a little bit easier to sell them on the concept. Is it possible to convince a client who has in their mind an adversarial rights-based court process to pursue collaborative law? Because I think it’s not just that lawyers are trained to think in an adversarial way, I think so much of our adversarial court process is ingrained in the public consciousness and when we think about dealing with a separation through legal means we tend to think about it in terms of courts and judges and someone winning and someone losing.
LB:

10:00

Yeah I think again it’s a really good question because it changed the way I did my initial interviews. So, when I started practising collaborative law and seeing the success that some clients were achieving, I actually almost remodelled my initial intake for clients and I started explaining it to them. It used to be that I explained to them the whole family law regime and then I would draw them a timeline and explain how a matter progresses through that timeline at the end of the conference and I’d address costs in that last part.
DT:These days that time line…
LB:These timelines are really blown out…
DT:You need a long white board…
LB:

 

 

11:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12:00

It goes the whole way across the wall. But what I do now is I take a little bit of background information and I say to them look before I talk to you about what the law is in family law, I want to talk to you about the ways you can resolve it. And I don’t know sitting here with you what’s going to be the best way, but I want you to have that in the back of your mind when I talk to you about what can happen in a matter. And I basically say to them there’s three ways that you can resolve you matter and they are in two distinct lines, one is the traditional way which has at the worst end a court and a judge making a decision and at the best end you reaching agreement through having a coffee with your partner up to mediation, up to different stages, and I say that timeline can go for three years depending upon when you start and finish. And then the other end of the spectrum is collaborative law and collaborative law is where you don’t engage in the dialogue where we send letters to start with. The first thing we do is get a room and try and have a discussion about what the urgent things are for your family at the moment and what you need to make the right decisions and be informed moving forward.

And importantly collaborative law isn’t about giving up your rights; it’s just about not pursuing entitlements in the same way that you might otherwise do it. And I think probably to answer your question directly, I very seldom have any client who walks in and says to me ‘I want to screw my partner over and get as much as I can’. Most people who walk in the door the first thing they say and their nerves about seeing the lawyer is ‘look I don’t really want to be here, I really don’t want to go through the legal process, I definitely don’t want to go to court, what’s a way that I can work this out?’ And when we talk through that it’s really appealing to lots of clients the collaborative model. What I did experience really early on when I was introducing collaborative law is that if I then tried to introduce it to their partner by way of an invitation in a letter, I had far less likelihood that they would engage in the process. So what I often do with clients now is put them onto a mediator or coach in collaborative law who then might reach out to their partner and say ‘look I’m an independent person your partner has reached out to me, they’ve met with a lawyer and they want to engage in this process, they’d like to invite you to do it,’ and the uptake has been significantly more by going through that avenue.

DT:

 

 

13:00

Do you think that’s because…I’m just thinking back to your story about a more traditional practitioner who a didn’t have a lot of regard for the process, do you think there are some practitioners who are in that adversarial mindset and think there’s some strategic game to be played by going through that process and have an instinctive desire to…. that there are some lawyers who are approaching that suggestion from an adversarial mindset and just have an instinctive reaction of shutting down that suggestion?
LB:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14:00

Yeah absolutely I think there are some people who talk clients out of collaborative law on the basis that if it doesn’t work out then ‘you can’t have me as your lawyer anymore, you’ll have to start from the beginning.’ And I think that if that’s how you lead your discussions on collaborative law you’re going to have people who don’t want to engage in the process.  Whereas if you say to clients look you know most matters that we deal with in any event settle before parties go to court, but this is a different way of approaching it where you talk about lots of things, you know. We found in a collaborative matter once that the real issue between the parties was the fact that the husband had moved out and left the wife with young children and she was really hurt by the fact he didn’t come back and mow the lawn. And it sounds really trivial and it’s not something you’d send a letter about, but when we spoke about it in the room, and her elderly father was mowing her lawn for her and she felt very guilty about that. When we spoke about it in the room the husband said I want to come back and do that I just didn’t want to interrupt your space with the children and I didn’t want you to feel that I was returning. Now that’s the type of thing it wouldn’t come out in correspondence between the parties, but their level of communicating for the next three months while we were still sorting the matter out, changed significantly because that had become such an emotional thing for her that it affected the way she communicated with him and because we were able to literally air it, they were different, they were different straight away in the mediation when they both heard each other’s perspectives, so I think you know that collaborative approach allows you to probably address some of the emotional aspects that as lawyers we don’t do for clients and I think in family law you have to. When the client rings you up often and family law they want to tell you all the things that are worrying them and you then have to filter through and put what we deem is relevant in correspondence. What’s really relevant for them is sometimes having these emotional issues addressed and I think you get to do that in a collaborative forum that you wouldn’t get to do otherwise.
DT:I want to flash forward now to having achieved that goal, everyone’s come to be involved in the collaborative law process and you need to sign the…is it called a collaboration agreement?
LB:Yep.
DT:Now you mentioned earlier that there’s a commitment in that agreement not to pursue the litigation process, that that’s also not a waiver or release of rights. What are the commitments in that agreement?
LB:

15:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

17:00

Yeah it again it’s completely counterintuitive to us as what we’d normally do as lawyers, so that you commit to be very open and frank in your dialogue. You commit to giving your advice in an open forum so unlikely you sit in a room and you might tell your client your entitlements are x, but we’ll scale it up to y so that when we go to the mediation you can look for…we give advice across the table. I might advise against my client while we’re sitting in the room. So we might be a mediated room and the other side might say look there’s a big inheritance and I’d say will look obviously that affects the contributions and I’d say that to my client while we’re sitting there so the agreement addresses how we are going to be really open about the way that we communicate advice and then if we do advice outside of the of the room which you are still entitled to do, that you will confirm that advice when you come back to the room. And you will do it in a manner that allows the open dialogue to happen. I guess transparency is the big thing out of that comes out in the collaborative agreement is that everybody agrees to be really transparent about how they manage things and to jointly approach it, and in that collaboration agreement you can have not just the parties, but you might have a financial neutral. So historically we’ve used financial neutrals who might come in and say look I’m going to have a look at the parties budget and I’m going to see if they both go their separate ways what they both need and I’m going to help educate someone cause they might not have a complete idea of the budgeting costs because in their role in the relationship one manage that more than the other. So the agreement can include the parties and the practitioners, the coaches involved, financial neutrals and sometimes a psychologist. If you have a psychologist who might be assisting with the children and the children’s wishes, so it’s an agreement on everyone’s behalf to really engage in a certain way that helps them move forward.

TIP: Collaborative law aside, participation in an alternative dispute resolution process is usually compulsory before any family law litigation. Under the Family Law Act, family dispute resolution is usually required before filing an application for an order in relation to a child under Part VII of the Act, such as parenting orders. It’s only if a mediation is held and is unsuccessful, or if there are factors that make mediation inappropriate, like family violence or child abuse, can an application be filed without first taking this step. 

DT:

 

I want to talk about the interdisciplinary approach to collaborative law. I suppose, and I think this is probably a feature again of even the traditional approach to family law, that you do have the assistance of other disciplines in resolving disputes. What is the qualification of the financial neutral, who are they usually?
LB:

 

 

 

18:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

19:00

 

 

Yeah so we have a couple of financial neutrals that exist so it can be an accountant who might step in and assist the parties and they then would be collaboratively trained like the lawyers to come into that framework. We have financial planners. We have one financial planner locally who does a lot of collaborative work and does work in collaborative matters in the city and her role primarily is really to assist with budgeting and planning moving forward. So often when we have these collaborative matters one of the first questions we’ll ask is what do both parties need to be on this? Not what we are entitled to, but what do we need? And sometimes the answer will be, well I don’t know, I don’t know what I need from the financial perspective, or I don’t know what that type of planning looks like. We’ve used accountants to assist with taxation issues that might be advice that benefits both parties to consider it you know previously parties might lock themselves down and get separate advice that’s to their respective advantage, but we’ve had accountants come in and provide some really good solutions for the parties as a couple that separating have had great tax advantages and it might be transferring shares to one parties name and selling them because there’s less CGT than being in the other party’s name, so really just coming up with a very collaborative approach that’s a win for the parties in the process. So we’ll often see accountants and financial planners who will assist.

TIP: What Leona has just described, that interdisciplinary approach, reminds me of another episode of Hearsay with Reece-Corbett Wilkins, who speaks about managing cyber incidents and data breaches, where a panel of individuals with different specialisations work together to manage a response. Now while cyber law and family law are worlds apart, in both cases there are examples of legal problems that can’t be solved well without the input of other professionals. While Leona has discussed financial neutrals or accountants who may be involved with the process, this can also include mediators, social workers, child consultants and psychologists.

DT:Is that financial planning aspect something that’s sometimes missing from the traditional approach? Do people get to the end of a very long court process and think well now what?
LB:

20:00

I think how it differs in collaborative law is if it’s addressed really early by everyone as being important, and everybody takes the information on board as to how they then resolve things, it’s very proactive rather than reactive. You’re not getting to the end of a long matter with X amount of dollars that comes to you because you’ve sold the house and thinking, well what do I do now, what does that mean and what are my options? And if both parties have approached it on the basis of ‘we think there is great benefit in both knowing how this works’, then that’s perfect. And I know that historically financial planners have come back sometimes in the collaborative meeting and explained to both parties what it looks like and sometimes the person who’s normally been the manager of the finances in the marriage gets a lot out of it because they go well I didn’t consider that that might be something the other person would need. Or they are the sole income provider and they didn’t maybe weigh up what the difference would be when they stepped aside when the maths was broken down at a certain level.
DT:

21:00

It sounds like the collaborative law process really hinges on transparency and candour. I can really see the benefit of that dynamic you described where you’re giving advice whether it’s encouraging or discouraging advice to your client in the room with the other side because I think you can really trust that the other side’s position whatever it is, is a well-considered and rational one. In an adversarial context you can completely consistently with your ethical duties, hold up a position that might not be the strongest one in terms of someone’s strict legal rights. You can have a reasonable case that’s not more likely than 50% to succeed, there’s nothing wrong with that, and sometimes you do get the impression that the other side’s case might be a bit of a try on, but I think removing that probably helps an enormous amount.
LB:

 

 

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24:00

 

Oh absolutely, and I think probably the other thing that will blow a lot of lawyers’ minds is we do a lot of prep for the meetings where we might be with two lawyers and the coach on the phone before we even get the parties in the room. And we might do that the day before a collaborative meeting where we’ll sit down, and we’ll have a bit of agenda, we’ll reset and I suppose readdress what were the parties’ ultimate goals at the start of the process. And in that way a coach is very good because if the lawyers do revert back to their traditional path the coach can bring them back in and will often say right let’s just go back to what the parties want to achieve here, they really want to move beyond this and be able to co-parent and we’ve got to help them do that. So it’s less about the strategic benefits of this, or what path we go down, and it can be as simple as and as difficult as diverting from the traditional path. You know I’ve had collaborative matters where we’ve done away with aspects we would normally adhere to quite strictly, getting valuations, doing disclosure because the parties have said we don’t want or need that, we want to take a real global approach and figure out if we get to the end of this what does it look like, and we’re happy to take this approach and as lawyers we instinctively want to go well no, let’s go all these steps back and tick all the boxes to make sure we’ve got the right figures and the right values so it’s their process and we have to guide them through it.

TIP: Generally, financial or property matters in family law have stringent disclosure requirements, which can be time consuming and often frustrating for clients. Rule 13.04 of the Family Law Rules 2004 requires full and frank disclosure of parties to a financial case of their financial circumstances. Some of the information and documents that parties are required to disclose include: payslips, interests in any properties together with valuations of those properties, bank statements, details of any relevant trusts, any liabilities including contingent liabilities and details regarding superannuation. These records can sometimes date back years or decades and can be a mammoth task for clients to assemble, and for lawyers to sift through.

We still guide them by making sure they haven’t sold themselves short and ultimately when you reach an agreement in a collaborative matter we still go down the same path of formalising that agreement and the lawyers still give advice about whether that agreement is in the range of what would be appropriate, but I think you know we park our advice about percentages we will become less about where do you see towards that percentage more about what do you need as part of your co-parenting moving forward and do you both have enough as part of that process.

DT:It sounds like your clients really need to have a clear idea of their goals before they come into that meeting?
LB:

 

 

25:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

26:00

Yeah definitely, and I think the first meeting is often about trying to establish that that’s the thought process and changing the mindset, and making sure that they’ve considered what’s important to them and how they move forward from here. And I think it really assists them when we get into a room to manage it. One of the reasons why collaborative law, I think, is very beneficial is that when you get in a room for your first meeting, the parties might be still living under the same roof and for most people that can be like a combustion oven where things can go wrong. If in that first meeting you set a lot of ground rules you take a lot of the fear out of the process. So you might agree, and we often do this in the first collaborative meeting, nobody is going to take money out of the bank accounts other than they would normally do. And we’re going to continue this regime with the kids and we’re going to have this living arrangement and we’re going to pay these bills when they pop up. Because otherwise what can happen in the alternative is that somebody goes and clears out the bank accounts because they got advice that they should load up their bank balance for their litigation path. Or somebody moves and takes the kids are afraid to hand them over in case they don’t get them back, so by getting in a room and having all of those initial discussions you really do eliminate a lot of the fear and you set the goals in the groundwork for what they’ve got moving forward and I think that really helps parties. I think in a lot of collaborative matters I’ve been involved in it could have gone drastically the other way where it’s being interim hearings and people arguing, but instead they were able to flesh out their concerns and address the middle room with the right people and it’s helped him to move forward.
DT:

 

 

 

27:00

I would love to see this adopted as a process outside of the family law area as well. In my area, I’m a commercial lawyer, the litigation work I do is commercial disputes or shareholder disputes maybe and often when there’s a business relationship breakdown I can see that many of those factors that you’ve been describing, a breakdown of trust, a sense of betrayal, an absence of communication between two people who otherwise might have known each other very well and they are all present in that dynamic as well. Do you see that collaborative law is best used for those disagreements about parenting or can it work really well for property as well?
LB:

 

 

 

 

 

 

28:00

 

 

I actually think it works really well with both. I think it’s about the approach of the parties as to how they want to extract themselves from the dispute. And you know I often describe it as the clients have gone through the collaborative process and I’ve had at least four who haven’t had children in the process and they’ve been older clients. Their position is they want to do it in a really dignified manner where it’s between them, they’re in a room, they’ve had a discussion, they don’t hide behind lawyers as they described (one of my clients), but also that they had dialogue that allowed them to move forward so I think it works very well for people who are minded that way. There’s a real movement at the moment to see collaborative law in Family Provisions Act claims, which I would say is a direct example of how it can also flow through.

TIP: If you are listening to episodes of Hearsay in order, our next episode with Simon Bennett discusses estate planning and family provision claims. The probate list is one of the busiest lists of the Supreme Court, if not the busiest list and family provision claims, like family law, can be quite sensitive areas of the law. As we all know, and as Leona has explained, parties are extremely connected, have a long history, and navigating a difficult time after a death in the family or separation can be challenging. Seeing collaborative practice shift into the area of family provision claims may allow us to see less delays in processing probate applications, and providing families with a less adversarial approach to these often sensitive matters.

DT:The process is so candid as we were discussing before, but there’s a lot of strategy that you bring to it as well isn’t there, there’s not the same litigation strategy necessarily, you’re not planning for that final hearing, but there is still a strategy to those collaborative meetings.
LB:

29:00

Yeah absolutely and then there’s a lot of client management in the meetings and I suppose correcting your language to make sure that you’re on board and you’ve got the right tone. In the collaborative matters that I’ve been involved with, you know I’ve had clients who have gotten up after 4 hours of discussions, hugged each other and then talked about who’s going to pick up the child that afternoon.
DT:Wow. That must be so rewarding.
LB:

 

 

 

 

 

30:00

It is really rewarding. You know we have situations where the collaborative coach and the two lawyers will debrief afterwards and really we will feel differently about assisting parties because they are better in the way that they have resolved it and in the way that they’ve moved on. And it works for matters where it’s a really small pot and there’s been little concern or there’s not detailed finances and it works really well for big detailed structures. We dealt with one where the parties owned a business together and the rationale for dealing with it collaboratively was that they both accepted they played a really important role in the business, they acknowledged that there probably wasn’t longevity for them to both always be in the business, but they saw great value in maintaining it for the benefit of their family for as long as they could until they figured out what roles they would take on. So from a collaborative perspective you certainly have to approach the meetings differently. You have to prep your client differently and there’s a higher level of engagement with the lawyer on the other side and the coach which I think benefits the parties.
DT:

 

 

 

I think even coming into this meeting today, I probably would have thought about collaborative law as you know a form of alternative dispute resolution sort of in the same category as mediation, or a settlement conference, or something like that, but it sounds like it’s actually down a very different path and I think the way you described how you bring on board new clients is an evocative way of describing that. That there’s the traditional path and that can end in a settlement or it can end in going to court, but those are two forks on the same road, but collaborative was a different road.
LB:

31:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

32:00

Yeah I think when I changed the way I approached by initial conferences it changed the way clients then considered it. And certainly I know that in the practise groups I have been involved in I’ve explained that I do it that way and lots of practitioners have sort of adopted that process, you know that’s a really different way to approach it that visually is quite distinctive for clients to show the difference between the two ways. And I think you’re right in that collaborative law isn’t just another alternative dispute resolution cause an alternative dispute resolution in my mind is an alternative to litigation, but you are always on the path of litigation. There’s always that fall back so when you go into a mediation your position can be well this doesn’t work will go back there. You have more skin in the game in collaborative law. The parties are more emotionally invested. You cut out the lawyers’ jargon that would otherwise exist. You don’t have the streams of correspondence, but it’s a different level of involvement. I think lawyers probably have to be more emotionally involved in a collaborative matter because they have to approach it less like a lawyer and more like someone who’s trying to assist the parties in whatever way they can.
DT:

 

For a listener who’s listening to this episode and wants to become involved in collaborative law, maybe they’re a family lawyer, that’ll be a bit easier for them, but maybe they’re not. How can one of our listeners start their journey towards practising collaborative law?
LB:

 

 

 

 

 

33:00

Yeah there’s lots of great courses that pop up all the time. I know that there’s one digitally that was just announced yesterday. Clarissa Rayward does a lot of them, Shelby Timmins from Divorce Done Differently is doing one at the moment, but Interrelate at the College of Law also offers them quite regularly so there’s lots of practitioners who engage with providing that information. It’s a commitment. It’s a two-day training that’s involved at the outset and then you could do master classes later on and that really introduces you to the mind shift change as to how it’s different and talks you through the process that’s involved. There’s also some collaborative training being offered for estate planning lawyers so anyone who wants to deal with family provision work so I think that’s really exciting to see that area coming out and I’d love to see some collaborative practice in that because I think it would be really well suited to it.
DT:Absolutely. Leona, thanks so much for joining us on Hearsay!
LB:

 

You’re welcome, thank you!

TIP: We’ve just heard from Leona about collaborative law from the perspective of a lawyer acting for a client. But remember – there are many roles in the collaborative process. One of those is the coach, and we’re going to hear from a coach now.

Part 2: Shelby Timmins

DT:Joining me to talk about the coach’s role in collaborative law is Shelby Timmins from Divorce Done Differently. Shelby thanks so much for joining us on Hearsay.
Shelby Timmins:Hi David.
DT:Now collaborative law has originated in family law but it has been adopted in a number of other practise areas, hasn’t it? Can you tell me a bit about that?
ST:

34:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

35:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

36:00

Yeah so it’s certainly been a growth area in family law and it started in the states with a family lawyer, actually, who was really quite disgruntled with that acrimonious adversarial process. Fellow called Stuart Webb and if you Google him you’ll come up with a letter that he actually wrote for a local judge around the concept of collaborative law, and it grew from there.

TIP: We briefly discussed Stuart Webb at the beginning of the episode, but let’s talk about this letter. On February 4 1990, he wrote to the Honourable Justice Keith of the Minnesota Supreme Court, describing this concept of collaborative law. I’m about to read to you a small extract of the letter, just after Stuart describes a weakness of the mediation process, which resonated with me and I’m sure it will with many of you listening as well, no matter which area of the law you practice in:

“But you and I have both experienced, I’m sure, those occasional times, occurring usually by accident, when in the course of attempting to negotiate a family law settlement, we find ourselves in a conference with the opposing counsel, and perhaps the respective clients, where the dynamics were such that in a climate of positive energy, creative alternatives were presented. In that context, everyone contributed to a final settlement that satisfied all concerned—and everyone left the conference feeling high energy, good feelings and satisfaction. More than likely, the possibility for a change in the way the parties related to each other in the future may have greatly increased. As a result, the lawyers may also develop a degree of trust between them that might make future dealings more productive.”

His practise was solely family law related, it’s now practised across the world through Europe, Asia and Australia more recently, and we are seeing it in other areas as an extension from family law. So we’re seeing a lot of wills and estates training happening in Australia in particular and I’ve seen it practised in building commercial disputes, any sort of family business related disputes, medical areas. It generally is a concept and a process so you can adapt that to any ongoing relationship dispute I would say.

DT:Yeah certainly as a lawyer that deals with corporate disputes myself, I can really see the potential of it in terms of family businesses or even early stage businesses where there’s two founders who might have expected to have a long running commercial relationship and have run into strife at an early stage. Tell me a bit more about the role of the coach because I think some traditionally trained lawyers, myself included, might think of that role as analogous to a mediator but in reality that role is quite different, isn’t it?
ST:

37:00

 

 

 

 

38:00

 

 

 

 

39:00

It is quite different, although a lot of the components of the training and a lot of those that are working in the coaching role are so nationally accredited mediators. We recently in our Sydney practise group, Collaborative Professionals NSW, did a lot of work around the role and qualifications of the coach and what we saw were important for that specific role. What I would say in terms of the coaches’ main tasks within the interdisciplinary team, is that we are the keeper of the process so we are the glue that keeps everybody together. We are also the professional that brings everybody to account when things might be strained offline. So often I have debriefing sessions or harder conversations with lawyers that may be becoming more positional or acrimonious, and that happens because we’re having some really tough conversations. I think historically collaborative has this, or when people think about collaborative practise, they have this connotation of you know people sitting around being friendly, you know this hand holding exercise, but it really involves some pretty robust conversations but respectful ones. The coach works with the clients directly in terms of, for me, parenting arrangements. I work with them directly around setting their goals knowing what their values are because it’s an interest based rather than a positional based negotiation. I work with them a lot around their ability to have a voice in the process and a decision-making voice. So empowering them to be educated alongside their lawyer but also an ability to know what they need and what their family needs. So we work a lot on that opening statement, whereas I think traditionally in mediation a lot of lawyers have wanted to do away with, or rushed through that opening statement as part of the process. Whereas I think it’s an incredibly powerful tool within the collaborative process. It’s the first time everyone in the room is going to hear from the people that matter the most in the process.
DT:It can be quite a perfunctory approach to the opening statement in mediation, but I love that idea that again I think it comes back to that openness and transparency, that it is really about hearing from the parties and being alive to, as you say, their interests rather than merely their positions. It sounds like the coach’s role is a much more active role than the role of a mediator?
ST:

40:00

 

 

 

 

 

41:00

I guess it depends on what sort of mediator you’re talking to. So my practise is probably half mediation, half collaborative in the coaching component. And I approach the majority of my mediations in a collaborative way so I’m encouraging people even in legally assisted mediations, to still look at what it is that everybody needs because that’s the only way we’re going to come to a true outcome for families anyway. That is long standing. I think gone are the days where we sit in a room from 9:00 o’clock till 6:00 or 7:00 or 8:00 o’clock at night with a mediation till people become so exhausted that they roll over and deals are done. We all know that they don’t have the longevity in them; that the bitterness and the difficulties with those relationships continue. Whereas collaborative is a staged process so we meet for much shorter meetings because neuroscience tells us a lot about how long people can concentrate, how long people can actually have the ability to make good decisions and pay attention. So it’s about having an ability to step inside the shoes of the other and come up with options. A huge component of the collaborative process is an option generation exercise. Come up with options that work for those people whether they’re a family or a business, any sort of ongoing relationship dispute.
DT:I’ve certainly been many mediations myself where I wonder whether hunger was the thing that ultimately got people across the line.
ST:Interesting that you say that!
DT:How do you as the keeper of the process keep to that sort of timetable? Because I think sometimes, again speaking from an experience in mediations, it can take a long time for parties to formulate an offer, or to be ready to make an offer. As a coach in a collaborative process how do you keep things moving?
ST:

42:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

43:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

44:00

 

So I guess the basis of the collaborative process is that it’s a series of meetings. Before each meeting the professionals involved discuss and circulate an agenda. So it’s a bit like knowing the topics that we’re going to talk through. Now that agenda is fluid because urgent issues might arise on the day or shortly before, but a lot of the success of a collaborative matter happens in the preparation.

TIP: The practice group Shelby mentioned earlier, Collaborative Professionals NSW, has a great article on their website, busting the myth that agendas are not needed in the collaborative law process. Some of the issues in the absence of an agenda include:

  1. Making the professional team look unprofessional;
  2. May provide an opportunity for one party to hijack the process and go off on a tangent;
  3. Issues that are unexpectedly raised can derail the process and catch the other party of guard;
  4. Which can ultimately leave parties feeling disillusioned with the process.

It’s an article about the collaborative process, but an agenda is just as important in a more traditional mediation or settlement conference.  We will leave a link to that article in our show notes.

So happens outside of those roundtable conferences. And that might mean me talking directly with the client about their communication style, helping them to identify what’s happening for the others that are involved, and I think it’s also really important to say about that hunger before, I’m really deliberate when I set my meeting rooms up, that there’s food, that there’s drinks, that there is an opportunity to get some fresh air, that we make sure that we’re not even sitting in a room for three hours, that we have an ability to get up and have a break. And I think that is a very deliberate step within that process, and that’s because we know that people can’t sit and concentrate particularly when there aren’t windows in an office and I think about traditional boardrooms. A lot of our legal firms, you know, our boardrooms don’t have windows, so we’ve got to be really mindful about the environment.

DT:

 

In a lot of negotiations, you might shy away from talking about the more contentious aspects because you don’t want to get away from talking about solutions, but in the collaborative law process being open about each party’s advice in a whole range of areas on those topics is important to reaching that outcome. Do you have difficulty even with collaboratively trained lawyers being open to the level of transparency that the process requires?
ST:

 

45:00

I think that’s a great question. I think if we look back on our traditional legal training, what’s happening in universities where you and I were taught very much a particular skill set, we were never taught, I’m probably a bit older than you, but we were never taught how to be collaborative, how to work as a team. We were always you know looking at being quite strategic and adversarial and traditional litigation or even negotiations, we hide behind lengthy letters, and you know detailed requests for disclosure documents, and we overload each other with this bundle of correspondence. That just doesn’t happen in collaborative law.
DT:

 

I think every lawyer has had an experience of a meeting, or a court hearing, or a similar situation where a few hours later or a few days later you think I wish I hadn’t of said that, I wish I had approached that differently, and I think it sounds like the collaborative law process gives you an opportunity to take that different approach next time. And allows the reality that sometimes people do make those missteps in a negotiation.
ST:

46:00

 

 

 

 

47:00

Yeah I think that’s exactly what it offers and it offers a space for not only the clients but for the professionals that are working with them to give each other a bit of support and scaffolding. Because we don’t know everything. Even, you know, the most knowledgeable professional doesn’t have the answers to everything. And I think about the area that I practise in, family law, it is very much a human issue and a lot of the things that need resolving aren’t legal. So it’s about hearing what it is that family needs. And that may be lost in a traditional process. Even in a mediation that’s running a traditional way where you’re still getting advice in private, you’ve still got strategies taking place, and you’ve still got the potential for court proceedings to be running parallel to the mediation process. Whereas in collaborative, there is no court. It is outside of the court process. Everyone signs a participation agreement that says we won’t threaten or go to court. There are some exceptions, for example, when urgent issues arise and people breach, I guess what we call those ground or base rules of a collaborative process, but primarily it is entirely outside of the court process. And everybody is engaged to reach resolutions for that, for those clients.
DT:Can you think of a time when perhaps in your experiences as a coach, or as a lawyer acting for one of the parties in a collaborative process, the outcome really hinged on something that you thought ‘well this just would never have come up in the traditional process’?
ST:

48:00

 

 

 

 

 

49:00

Yes. So I was involved in a matter where the family had a small child with some significant health issues and those healthy issues were urgent and pressing. And some decisions needed to be made around the care component and medical intervention. And the family was falling apart because of the stresses involved in the health issues. They still had a lot of respect for each other, they accepted that their relationship as a couple was coming to an end, but their relationship as a family needed to continue because they were spending significant periods of time in and out of hospital having to talk to other professionals. And I think in that case, it wasn’t about parental responsibility or decision-making, it was about how are we going to continue to work as a team practically? Who’s going to come to the hospital, who’s going to deliver meals, who’s going to keep things going at home, how are we going to fund this when one of us isn’t working? All of the realities of having a child who was unwell, and they needed a space to come up with those resolutions pretty urgently. And unlike a lot of other dispute resolution processes, and certainly at court, they are lengthy and delayed. So we were able to bring this family and a team of professionals together very quickly.
DT:And I suppose not just the speed of that process but the ability to look at that relationship through different facets. That they were separating but it was important to preserve another kind of relationship.
ST:

50:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

51:00

They were going to have constant interaction, they were going to have to deal with other professionals i.e. a medical team. We were also able to engage…they had a medical officer, their specialist, to get a bit of insight into what it looked like on the other side because we were sitting in a space that was still quite formal in the sense of you know we were in a lawyer’s office. My office is set up with some tub chairs and a low lying coffee table so I removed that hole issue of the table dividing us, splitting us, but I think being able to bring people on quickly with the appropriate knowledge in a safe place, when that family was grieving they weren’t just grieving their relationship breakdown, they were grieving a lot of other things, and the complex factors of their financial pressures and inability to work like they had in the past. And to care for other children, they had other children in that dynamic. So there were some really complex family dynamics that weren’t family law issues. If we’d gone down a traditional path, I think they would have been able to structure who was going to be at the hospital at what time and who was going to be making certain decisions around ongoing care and treatment, but they never would have had the space to talk about the practicalities of grocery shopping, meals, getting other children to school. Like it was genuinely a team effort.
DT:It’s just not the sort of thing that a court or even a traditionally minded lawyer would turn their mind to.
ST:Absolutely.
DT:It sounds like that family was able to use the collaborative law process because they probably identified the value of having that ongoing relationship.
ST:

52:00

Yes I think the lawyers that they saw, we were really fortunate that those lawyers were collaboratively trained, so that when they each individually went to them, they could see that rawness and they could see that desire to want to maintain a sense of family. And they were both very experienced in collaborative, so I think we were off to a really good start from that first touch point. Because often what we find is people have never heard of interdisciplinary collaborative practise. A lot of lawyers haven’t heard about it, and so educating the professionals involved but also then our clients is a really important process.
DT:An important part of collaborative law process is that commitment not to resort to the traditional way of resolving disputes even if things do get difficult, but are there points in the process where as a coach you have to say, ‘well that’s it, this process has to terminate, it’s no longer conducive to resolving the dispute’?
ST:

53:00

 

 

 

 

 

54:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

55:00

So the participation agreement that everybody signs at the beginning of a collaborative process, and typically in the first meeting, so the lawyers, any other professional that’s engaged, the coach and the parties themselves, that sets out very clearly what I guess are the parameters and expectations around that open transparent communication, sharing of information and documentation. Just generally the respectful way in which meetings will take place. And the difficult issues arise and I think anyone that’s practised in collaborative for some time now will have come across a matter where there is either a threat to go to court or some discussion around ‘well if it doesn’t resolve this is it I’m over, it’s the last meeting, I’m not coming back again’ or you know ‘if they don’t take this proposal the cards are off the table.’ Part of the team, and it’s not just the coach but the coach primarily has this responsibility, is to call the elephant in a room and to call it in a respectful way. At that point it might be you call a private session. You might meet with the client and the lawyer, you might meet just with the lawyer if it’s the lawyer that said you know I can’t see this continuing.

TIP: The utility in a coach is really clear in this example Shelby just gave. The ability and space for a third party to step in, where parties may not be able to do so, is particularly useful. You can really see how a coach is the glue that binds the collaborative process together.

I think it’s those stages along the way that’s the time to lean in rather than lean out. So that’s it time to pull the team together and say how are we going to fix this? How are we going to come up with options? And I sort of look at it in three main ways 1) what is the problem 2) what are the options, and then 3) how do we move that forward? What do we do to come up with an agreement? And I think if you keep asking the ‘why’ questions, tell me a bit more about that, why is that impacting you so much, where is that coming from and you explore what sits in around that. That’s where you get those really creative option generation exercises happening.

DT:Can you think about a time when you pulled a process back from the brink like that where it was very nearly at that point of no return and you managed to get it back on track?
ST:

 

56:00

 

 

 

 

 

57:00

Yeah I have, quite recently actually, I was involved in a collaborative matter with a team and the finances in the family were quite strange and so we were trying to preserve things. it was in the middle of COVID, somebody had lost their job. The money coming into the family even though that family had separated, well the couple had separated, had substantially changed from the beginning of the process. So people’s response to financial pressure, we know the research tells us that you know one of the main causes for divorce is financial pressure. So having an ability to identify that and then to educate both people that were involved around what that meant. At that time, we brought in what I will call a financial neutral, so it was somebody that came into the process that met with both clients around their goals and interests from a financial perspective, but also from a family perspective, and they were able to model from a dollar perspective what those options might look like. So, it was a game changer. Had we not had that financial neutral on board that could take the information, the interests and needs of the family, and compute them into some financial modelling so they could each see what it looked like for the other.
DT:Yeah right.
ST:

 

 

 

 

 

58:00

 

Yeah and it’s done in a visual way, so it’s not a whole lot of spreadsheets and balance sheets. This particular case there was you know pictorials up of if you got this amount of money or if you did this with these investment properties, or if you did that with your super, this is what it would look like over the longevity of your life. And these are the things that will impact you along the way. If you keep these sort of income, if you’ve got a few extra days with work, those sorts of things are able to play out visually and particularly for the husband in this case being able to see the impact of those decisions for his wife and who was also going to be the primary carer of their children because they had agreed on that component was really important. And it shifted entirely, so we went from a situation where one, they didn’t think they could continue to afford the process and the money coming into the family had dramatically shifted, to being able to bring someone else on into the team, work with that family and the next meeting it resolved.
DT:

 

 

 

 

59:00

 

Going back to what you were saying about disillusionment with the outcome of a traditional process, I think that’s definitely the case with business owners as well, there’s definitely some statistics published by the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman about the fact that many litigators, plaintiffs and defendants tend to think that either the result isn’t fair or if it was fair that the time and cost to get there was disproportionate to the result. So it’s definitely not an unfamiliar experience. Even though collaborative law is a growing area and many lawyers in your field and in other fields are now aware of it, there are still a lot of lawyers who are sceptical about it as a process. To those sceptics who don’t see it as a robust way to resolve disputes what would you say to them?
ST:

 

 

 

 

1:00:00

 

 

 

 

 

 

1:01:00

Put your hand up and get involved, come and sit in and watch our process work. In New South Wales we have a fabulous programme running through Collaborative Professionals NSW. Where you can be a note taker, so part of the collaborative process is that there’s not this bundle of exchange of correspondence, but somebody will take the notes or the minutes of the meeting. So we’ll document any agreements that people reach, they will then potentially be formalised in court documents but, or in binding documents, but the minutes of the meeting are reflective of the discussions that took place, the agreements reached, and any homework or tasks that people need to do before the next meeting.

TIP: Collaborative Professionals NSW have posted as recently as June 2020 that they are looking for volunteer note-takers in collaborative matters. We will leave a link to this in the show notes where you can find more details if you are interested.

What else I would say about that is it’s OK to be sceptical. I think as lawyers we again are taught to look for the loopholes, look for the negatives, look for what might not work, but I would really encourage people to learn a little bit more about it before they make that judgement. I think historically, and that’s really the last five or ten years in Australia, we’ve had a lot of growth where very well respected professionals and lawyers primarily have engaged, done some training, and can see the benefits for their clients in terms of preserving an ongoing relationship, entering a process that is supportive, typically cheaper than a court process, certainly shorter, and I can only speak for the family law perspective but at the moment we’re looking at three and four year delays before we’re getting to trial from the date of commencing proceedings. To say to a family or to a business ‘you’ve just got to put things on hold for that period of time,’ it’s just unsustainable. You can’t expect people after that time to still have a relationship. You are stripping everything from them. The filing of affidavits is never positive, it’s always tearing relationships apart rather than bringing them together.

DT:

 

1:02:00

I think even for those sceptics, their position is driven by ultimately a motivation to fiercely defend the interests of their clients and it sounds like there are plenty of reasons why at least trying collaborative law is something that might be an interest to at least some of their clients.
ST:

 

 

 

 

1:03:00

And don’t look at collaborative as not having an ability to using your words to fiercely defend, it’s not to fiercely defend but there’s some very, I call “colourful” conversations, we’re talking about the tough stuff, we’re talking about what matters to people, not what matters to the lawyers. Because often when somebody comes into an initial meeting with you as a lawyer, you’re trying to come up with answers that you think the law gives them. But that may not be what they actually need. So retraining your professional skill set to listen, to look at what the goals and the interests and values are for that person can be really challenging. And we’ve got a lot of traditional professionals that don’t want to engage because they feel like they’re beyond that, that’s a soft skill that makes them uncomfortable, or vulnerable, or exposed. And that’s OK. It’s not for everybody, but I certainly see that there’s an enormous value in it particularly in certain areas of law.
DT:

 

There’s a running theme I think and it’s not just collaborative law but it’s also about the way that we price services, or the way that we offer our services bundled or unbundled, or the way that we conceive of a client’s problem, that it’s no longer about finding the problem and applying the solution that we learned in our undergraduate degree, that we really have to move beyond solutions to outcomes. And I think collaborative law is a part of that trend.
ST:And outcomes that are for the people involved not the professionals.
DT:Absolutely.
DT:

1:04:00

I’ve really enjoyed this conversation about collaborative law, I feel like I’ve learned a lot and hopefully our listeners have too!
ST:Thank you.
DT:

 

 

 

 

1:05:00

 

 

 

 

1:06:00

Shelby thanks for joining us on Hearsay!

You’ve been listening to Hearsay The Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank our guests Leona Bennett from Southern Waters Legal and Shelby Timmins from Divorce Done Differently for coming on the show. Now if you liked this episode above collaborative law, you can hear Leona again on our episode about advising vulnerable clients where she talks about the insidious nature of financial abuse in family law matters. Or, if you’d like a change of pace, listen to our episode about sentencing with Matthew McAuliffe from Wardell Chambers and Michael Vo from Austere Legal. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one continuing professional development point for listening to this episode. Now whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD point is self-assessed but we suggest this episode constitutes an activity in the professional skills category. If you’ve claimed five or more CPD points from audio content already this year, you might need to access our multimedia content to claim further points from listening to Hearsay. Visit htlp.com.au for more information on claiming and tracking your points on our platform. The Hearsay team is Tim Edmeades who puts our sound together, Kirti Kumar who writes our educational website content, Araceli Robledo who manages all of our marketing and books our guests, and me, David Turner, your interviewer. Hearsay The Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Assured Legal Solutions, making complex simple. You can find all of our episodes as well as summary papers, transcripts, quizzes and more at htlp.com.au. That’s HTLP for Hearsay The Legal Podcast.com.au. Thanks for listening.