Times Online reports on more fallout from the Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce: a call by senior High Court family judge Justice Coleridge for collaborative divorce. [The Telegraph also covered the story.]
Frances Gibb writes (excerpt):
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”.