When considering your divorce process options, it can feel overwhelming or confusing. Collaborative Practice Kansas City explains your divorce process options and how to choose the right one for your family.
By understanding the choice you have in deciding your divorce process options, you’ll be more informed to make decisions to achieve the outcome you’re looking for at the resolution of your divorce.
Divorce can be one of the most overwhelming experiences in your life but knowing your divorce process options can help prepare you for the steps you’ll take and decisions you’ll make. As a couple, you are faced with practical challenges like separating one household into two, adapting to new schedules and responsibilities, and finding ways to meet unanticipated expenses. Add to this the emotional issues that can affect your ability to think clearly, and the situation can seem overwhelming and unmanageable. Once you’ve decided to divorce, how you’ll divorce is the single most significant choice. Understanding your various divorce options will assist with this decision.
At Collaborative Practice Kansas City, we specialize in the Collaborative Process, but in the interest of educating you further, explain the four different divorce process options below:
- Contested Divorce – This is normally the first option people think of or are aware of when choosing to divorce. It is the traditional adversarial divorce process that involves litigation in a court of law.
- Collaborative Divorce – This approach removes the legal threats and court intervention and replaces them with respectful, transparent and private meetings. Both you and your spouse will still receive legal counsel, but agree to work to a more cooperative resolution outside of the courts.
- Divorce Mediation – For divorce mediation, you and your spouse engage a neutral third party to assist you in reaching agreements about your divorce. The mediator does not need to be a lawyer and does not represent either of you and the mediator cannot offer legal advice.
- Do-It-Yourself Divorce – In a do-it-yourself or “pro se” divorce, you and your spouse represent yourselves before the court and do not hire attorneys to counsel you on your legal rights or provide the kind of legal documentation necessary to ensure your divorce when it is finished is actually legal.
We want to help divorce in the greater Kansas City area evolve from that old-fashioned contested or adversarial process that is so frequently destructive into a more cooperative and creative process. We do this by showing clients how to get a divorce using the collaborative process.
For more information about the Collaborative Process and to learn if it’s right for you and your family, contact a Collaborative Practice Kansas City team member at 913-380-2560 or click here.
