I recently attended the 16th Annual Forum of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals, and I had the opportunity to attend a workshop led by Gary Direnfeld, a social worker and collaborative professional in Ontario, Canada. He was an excellent speaker and was discussing cutting edge ideas on helping families.
Gary was recently on a radio program to discuss an age-old question: Can therapy help save a marriage?
Collaborative divorce and family law began 25 years ago, in 1990, when a Minnesota attorney named Stu Webb decided that he simply no longer wanted to be part of an adversarial divorce process. He strongly felt that divorce did not belong in the court system: decisions about where children should sleep at night should be made by the parents, and discussions of financial issues should happen around a private conference room table rather than in a public courtroom.
And so, he developed collaborative divorce, where parties agree from the very beginning that their collaborative attorneys cannot be used to fight it out in the court system.
The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals has put out a video commemorating 25 years of collaborative practice. You can find the video below the jump.
As LGBT rights have gained acceptance in Florida and throughout the U.S., it has become more common to learn about a spouse in an opposite-sex marriage – sometimes a long-term marriage – come out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. There is a term for marriage where one spouse is straight and the other spouse is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender: Mixed Orientation Marriages. The term can also be applied to same-sex marriages where one of the spouses is bisexual or gender fluid.
Transcending Boundaries, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides education, activism, and support for persons whose sexuality, gender, sex, or relationship styles do not fit within conventional categories, has published a brochure that discusses and provides resources for those spouses in Mixed Orientation Marriages.
The brochures says the following about Mixed Orientation Marriages:
The Tampa Bay Times is reporting a proposal by a Chinese economics professor to deal with the fallout of the country’s decades’ long One Child policy: allow marriage between one woman and multiple husbands.
Below are some excerpts about Professor Xie Zuoshi’s idea:
By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches.” Birth control policies that since 1979 have limited many families to one child, a cultural preference for boys and the widespread, if illegal, practice of sex-selective abortion have contributed to a gender imbalance that hovers around 117 boys born for every 100 girls.
Rosemary Barkett, the first female Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court and former federal judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit believes that the court system is not an appropriate place to resolve divorce-related matters.
![[Portrait: Justice Rosemary Barkett]](http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/about/gallery/barkett.jpg)
Below are excerpts from a series of interviews of Justice Barkett conducted between 2006-2009 and recorded as part of the American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division Women Trailblazers in the Law program:
Up until recently, chapter 63 of the Florida Statutes, which contains the state’s adoption laws, was explicitly anti-gay. Chapter 63 and adoption case law stated that whether prospective parents could adopt a child should be based on the best interests of the child, with one exception.
That exception was laid out in Florida Statutes section 63.042(3) (2014), which provided that “No person eligible to adopt under this statute may adopt if that person is a homosexual.”
Since I opened my law practice, I have received phone calls from potential clients asking if they could bring their spouse to the divorce consultation. Their purpose was to go to a lawyer together, hear the same information, and demonstrate that they are not trying to hire a “pitbull lawyer” or engage in dirty trial tactics. They simply wanted to dissolve their marriage, and they did not want to fight in order to make the divorce happen.
Almost all Tampa Bay divorce lawyers refuse such a request to meet both spouses. In fact, for the first few years, I also would not meet with both parties. The reason was simple: the Florida Bar has found time and again that it is unethical for an attorney to represent both spouses to a divorce because there is an insurmountable conflict of interest. Further, attorneys do not want to even give the impression that they are representing both spouses, so they avoid meeting with both spouses.
But now, I encourage both spouses to come to a divorce consultation. In fact, I charge half my normal consultation fee, because I believe that one of the best ways to ensure that a marriage ends amicably is for both parties to start the divorce process together.
The following is part of an appellate brief that I wrote which outlines how the Florida legislature, the Florida Supreme Court, and the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit in and for Tampa encourages the settlement of disputes, especially in family law matters:
Florida strongly encourages out-of court settlement of disputes. See Fla. Stat. § 61.001(2)(b)-(c) (the purposes of Chapter 61, among other things, are “(b) To promote the amicable settlement of disputes that arise between parties to a marriage; and (c) To mitigate the potential harm to the spouses and their children caused by the process of legal dissolution of marriage.”); In re Report of the Family Law Steering Committee, 794 So. 2d 518, 522-523 (Fla. 2001); see, also, Robbie v. City of Miami, 469 So. 2d 1384, 1385 (Fla. 1985) (“[s]ettlements are highly favored and will be enforced whenever possible.”).
In re Report finds, in part, the following:
The Florida Supreme Court should adopt the following guiding principles as a foundation for defining and implementing a model family court:
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3. All persons, whether children or adults, should be treated with objectivity, sensitivity, dignity, and respect.
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I recently was at the St. Petersburg studios of Money Talk 1010 AM with fellow attorney Joryn Jenkins to discuss, among other things, how a collaborative divorce tends to make more financial sense then going through the traditional courthouse divorce. The discussion was facilitated by Let’s Talk Law’s Roxanne Wilder and sponsored by Next Generation Divorce.
The radio program begins around the 5:30 mark after the jump below.
Family Diplomacy’s managing attorney Adam B. Cordover gave a presentation on “The New Family: LGBTQ+ Issues & Family Law” at the 2015 Fall Conference of the Florida Court Professional Collaborative (FCPC) of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit. The title of the Conference was “2015 Trends in Family Law.”
