The following was posted on ABA-FLS listserve today. It was promted
by my post that CP had fewer problems with clients running out of
money. John Crouch of Virginia gave an excellent reply, but I'd like
to say something more.(The writer might continue to think that have
been lawsuits, but we are trying to keep them quiet.) Can anyone help?
Honey Hastings
"I would like to know what the "collaborative law" attorneys
experience is with unhappy clients. I understand that there are some
unique lawsuits pending against the lawyers for being too freindly
with the opposition."
John replied:
If you're asking because you're seriously considering doing
collaborative,and you want to have your question answered as
thoroughly as possible, you
may want to join the collablaw listserv, the unofficial listserv of
theInternational Academy of Collaborative Practitioners, at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollabLaw/
Every time in the past that the question has come up of whether there
havebeen any malpractice lawsuits, the answer has emerged that no,
there haven'tyet, in the 15 years that collaborative law has been
around. And I don't seehow professional friendliness with opposing
counsel would be the basis for asuit.
In my own cases and any other that I know about, when clients are
dissatisfied it's a milder form of the same complaints that most
divorceclients have -- why is this so expensive, why does it take so
long, whycan't we just make a simple superficial agreement without
working out all these details, why can't you just make my spouse
agree, why all these court forms to fill out, I need this and I need
that and I need it now and I need
it cheap and I need to stay out of court and don't tick my spouse
off. And some discontent comes from genuine problems with lawyers
that are also common in non-collaborative law -- including
delay/neglect of cases (which
is somewhat prevented by the custom of always having deadlines and
future meetings scheduled far ahead of time), being too
confrontational (often newbies without enough training), and
sometimes lawyers taking cases outside their areas of expertise.
As our trainer George Richardson pointed out, as a collaborative
lawyer your reward must be the satisfaction of a job well done and
higher collection rates, because most clients haven't been divorced
before and therefore don't know what they're missing.
