Can collaborative divorce or divorce mediation address pressure, coercion, and power imbalances more effectively than litigation? Join us for a deep dive into these questions with collaborative divorce attorney and mediator, Karen Van Kooy. We share our experiences and insights, contrasting the stark differences in handling a court-based divorce versus a collaborative law or mediated approach.
In this lively discussion, we unravel the complexities of coercion and imbalance that can surface in divorces. Karen shares her insights and strategies and explores the need for setting boundaries in the tricky terrain of power dynamics that can sometimes lead to coercion.
We discuss decision-making within the context of divorce mediation and the significance of considering all possible options. We consider how collaborative professional teams can handle pressure dynamics using techniques like breakout rooms, interest-based discussion, and option generation. Above all, Karen underscores the need to remind clients that the power to make the final decision lies in their hands.
Can collaborative divorce or divorce mediation address pressure, coercion, and power imbalances more effectively than litigation? Join us for a deep dive into these questions with collaborative divorce attorney and mediator, Karen Van Kooy. We share our experiences and insights, contrasting the stark differences in handling a court-based divorce versus a collaborative law or mediated approach.
In this lively discussion, we unravel the complexities of coercion and imbalance that can surface in divorces. Karen shares her insights and strategies and explores the need for setting boundaries in the tricky terrain of power dynamics that can sometimes lead to coercion.
We discuss decision-making within the context of divorce mediation and the significance of considering all possible options. We consider how collaborative professional teams can handle pressure dynamics using techniques like breakout rooms, interest-based discussion, and option generation. Above all, Karen underscores the need to remind clients that the power to make the final decision lies in their hands.
Welcome to Mending Fences, a podcast about effective ways to communicate and live with differences. I'm Patrice Brymner.
Jen Hawthorne:And I'm Jen Hawthorne. We're both family law mediators and collaborative law attorneys, but our conversations go well beyond family law. We explore the personal, interpersonal, legal and cultural impact of conflict.
Patrice Brymner:Hi and welcome back to Mending Fences. I'm Patrice Brymner and I'm here today with Jen Hawthorne, as always. Hi, Patrice, hi Jen, and a friend and colleague of ours, a mutual friend and colleague, Karen Van Kooy, who is a collaborative attorney and mediator here in Massachusetts, and Karen's going to join us today for what I think will be a really interesting conversation. But by way of background, I want to just share that Karen and I met years ago and I'm not sure what year it was. It might have been 2011. I'm not even sure 2011. Okay, it was all litigated. We were counsel on all litigated divorce. It was one of my first divorces in Massachusetts and she was opposing counsel and I don't know somewhere.
Patrice Brymner:In that case we started working kind of collaboratively. We started naturally looking at ways to help these people get through some. It was a complex. What I remember, karen is a complex financial review not necessarily financially complex, but a lot of review and we worked together to get through that. And sometime after that, a couple years later, we stayed in touch.
Patrice Brymner:We remained friends after that case and sometime after that I had a really difficult case with a client with whom I had become at odds. We really were clashing in how to approach the case and I got on the phone with Karen one day and just said I can't do this anymore. I don't like being at odds with my own client. And she said why don't you come do the collaborative training it's like next week and I signed up and it changed everything and it really put me on this other trajectory. So thank you, karen, for that, and I think it's a it sort of talks to where we are now, why we do what we do, and I want to hear from you why you made that decision years before I did, to start to turn away from litigation.
Karen Van Kooy:You know, it's funny because I think there's sort of this spherical aspect to our friendship, because I had taken the training in 2007 or 2008,.
Karen Van Kooy:But I had just joined another attorney's firm there were three of us at the time and she had made that switch to out of court and so I was designated as the court-based attorney.
Karen Van Kooy:So, while I took the collaborative law training and was very attracted to the philosophy, the approach, the sort of just way of being in the world, I couldn't do it in my practice and I spent many years after that doing litigated cases and you became a touchstone for me because you made the decision before I did to turn away from litigation and you really sort of dove into the collaborative community and networking and making contacts, which, in my mind, that is the most important aspect of becoming a collaborative professional is to make the connections and build the relationships, and I thought, well, if Patrice can do that, then I can do it too, and I worked my way towards it. I actually took the training again, which was also phenomenal because the way the trainings were happening shifted the curriculum, I believe, got much richer. So the 2012 training I took which may have been, yeah, you and I took it together. That's right. That's right. We did it together.
Patrice Brymner:Right, and now you're a trainer.
Karen Van Kooy:Yes, now I am one of the trainers and I love that part of my work. And then it wasn't until 2019 where I said no more cases that are going to be court-driven. And I have been reminded of how wise that decision was, because I have a few carryover cases and tomorrow I have to go into court and litigate on some motions, and we had a it's not a pretrial, but it's a motion hearing in the court, or the judge ordered us to meet to try and settle, and it was one of the most painful meetings I have ever sat through, because, the Christ, the conflict is reduced to money, and it is not a lot of money, I mean and by that I'm saying it's in the $20,000, $30,000 range and every person involved, something tragic or painful has occurred in the past year, and that's, in my estimation, what's underlying a lot of the positioning. And it's not just, it's a conflict that involves not just the married couple who've gotten divorced, but a special master who was brought into the case and just mishandled start to finish because of tragic events on the outside.
Karen Van Kooy:And so I was just listening to all this pain and people wanting to be recognized for the pain that they had been experiencing and why that may or may not have justified what they did or didn't do. And I just thought we're going to go in front of a judge and you know there's going to be no nuance, there's going to be no depth of discussion, there's going to be no healing, it's going to be a right, wrong, up down or split the baby outcome, so no one's going to end up getting anything they needed from it. I do think my client reflected to me after that meeting that what she did get and I believe this is something really important is she was able to say in her own voice to this attorney what her experience had been and how painful and disruptive and damaging she felt the attorney's actions had been. So maybe that's the silver lining in this dispute.
Karen Van Kooy:The attorney who is the special master, Karen yes, yes, well, who wasn't the special master that's part of the issue but was acting as if and so maybe that's what she needed. But I know that for me, my past few weeks of having to prepare for this, it's just a lifestyle that I don't want anymore. And it isn't to say that I don't have collaborative law cases or mediations, where it's painful, tragic, lots of emotion, but the approach behind it is so different than it is in this litigated approach. So I am so grateful to be here, I'm so grateful you are colleagues in my life that I can rely on to you know, reality check and get some advice. And it was just one of the best decisions I ever made to switch to an out of court practice.
Patrice Brymner:Yeah, I wanna just echo the community that we are a part of and it's the three of us and many other people, some of whom have been guests on the show or will be. It's such a rich community of professionals and it's something that, as a litigator, I couldn't have access. I just could never have accessed the level of insight and expertise that you can get in the mediation community and in the collaborative law community. And before we started recording, we were talking and you touched on some of these things, Karen.
Patrice Brymner:It's so hard to explain to folks coming to us for an initial consultation and they're just exploring divorce process choices. It's almost impossible to explain to someone the benefits, the full benefits, of trying to stay out of court and it's not just because we like it better, right, it's how will it affect them? And there are things that are difficult to describe or explain, and one of the things we were talking about was the danger of coercion or pressure in many forms that can come into a litigated case, and you just talked about some of it and the things that are left out, like the opportunity to be heard or the exploration of choices, and so I'm hoping to open up that conversation a bit.
Jen Hawthorne:Yeah, I think that that's a really important conversation to have, patrice, in unrecorded offline conversations.
Jen Hawthorne:Patrice and I have talked about also a couple of times just what happens in a process when someone feels coerced into a decision, and I feel pretty strongly just from what I've witnessed not any other reason that when litigation is opened, people start to feel this pressure and as court dates approach, they start making decisions that aren't based on an exploration of people's wants and needs and goals, so it's not an interest-based conversation.
Jen Hawthorne:They feel pressured to either quickly gather information and share it or sometimes to make decisions without full information. There's a lack of check-in on whether people actually really agree with what they're agreeing to, whether they really buy in and want to live by what they're agreeing to. Sometimes people are saying well, I'm agreeing to this because if I don't, I have to do X, y and Z in court, and the biggest risk of court is complete loss of control, ie the judge gets to make all of the decisions, and so sometimes I've found that people will make bad decisions for themselves, decisions that they regret, sometimes almost immediately, sometimes not for a year or five years, but eventually people come back and say I made that decision because we had a court date and I thought I had to. I thought I didn't have a choice.
Karen Van Kooy:Right people in my life that I don't represent, but they tell me their stories. So many of them have said either A I didn't know, I had a choice, I was just told I had to do X, y and Z, or they just wanted to get it over with and so settled, and they didn't realize how hard it was gonna be to live with those agreements, ranging from how often you see your children and where you live and where the other parent lives, to how much money that you're paying and when that changes, if it changes, and they just totally resent it and then are either stuck in a position of having ongoing resentment towards the other parent which, as we all know, in our own lives and in the lives of our clients, it comes through. It comes through to the kids, it comes through to extended family can't get away from that or they go back and they fight and they were like penny wise and pound foolish, because now they're paying thousands of dollars for modifications or contents.
Patrice Brymner:Yeah, to me that is the big danger in litigation if it's not handled well or not vetted. If the issues aren't vetted carefully which I think is hard to do in litigation even people, even really good professionals, might have a hard time fully vetting issues in litigation. And instead we know and we now have I've had the opportunity of years of experience to see in mediation and collaborative how different that can look, and so can we talk a little bit about what that looks like and where pressure or coercion can be averted or openly dealt with in an out of court process.
Karen Van Kooy:Well, I had mentioned in an earlier conversation that one of the places that I find my challenges with this issue comes up the most is more in mediation than in collaborative law.
Karen Van Kooy:In collaborative law, while it definitely comes up, I recognize I'm part of a team, so no issue is just my issue. I have other people to help me think through it and to be creative around it. In mediation, I have had cases where I definitely feel there is coercion between the parties. There's a power imbalance. I'm not talking about out and out abuse, even physical or psychological, but there's just this undercurrent of patterns of acquiescence and control and in those cases I have made the decision that I won't continue with those clients unless they have attorneys and use the attorneys during the process. At that point, and oftentimes what is actually happening is it is a case that they don't have the competency or the desire and it ends up being litigated. Other times it's just what they needed. One of the people needed this advocate to help them access what their real needs were, what their real interests were, and balance out the conversation. So that's one of the places where coercion has popped up for me from or in between the clients and my way of handling it.
Patrice Brymner:Yeah, I've seen that in mediation as well and I'm sure Jen has, and I, like you, that has become my approach is to at some point steer them towards attorneys and one of the benefits of that - so people may be wanting to avoid attorneys when they enter mediation - but one of the benefits of including attorneys in mediation, even if they're not attending the sessions, is that the person who may be - I'm thinking of a recent case; there was one person who just wasn't a strong advocate for themselves. So they were acquiescing and acquiescing and there wasn't too much - I could only do what I could do. I couldn't, but once that person had access to an attorney, the conversation really changed and it ended up settling and everything resolved nicely. But they just needed that access to an advocate to talk to outside of mediation. It made all the difference.
Jen Hawthorne:And I think an intermediary step that I sometimes use in my mediation is when I feel like there is that level of decision-making imbalance is caucusing and speaking to each party separately, because sometimes you can have a conversation with each party where they're willing and able to say things that they won't say in front of the person that they're in conflict with, and oftentimes it's not things that are gonna ultimately affect the outcome of the agreement, like what the terms of the agreement are, but sometimes just them.
Jen Hawthorne:Sharing their thoughts and feelings and interests and goals can get them to a place where they can recognize for themselves that they're not agreeing to something that meets their interests and goals and they go back into the meeting with their spouse or co-parent or whoever it is that they're in this conflict with, and they're much more prepared to say something. And whenever I do that, I always at least offer time to both folks that I'm mediating with and I often find the person who, in a joint meeting, it felt like they were controlling the outcome. They're often not aware that that's what's happening and if you're able to share information with them in a way that's not putting them on the spot or making them feel defensive about what's happening in the room, they might be able to take a step back and you can broaden the conversation and open that up. And I think what Karen already said about the team approach and collaborative is obviously there's three professionals at a minimum there and so you just have more people who are able to open up that conversation.
Karen Van Kooy:That made me think of two things. They're asides, so feel free to draw me back, but two other things that popped up for me is one of the things I love about at least my mediation agreement that I enter with clients is it's a voluntary process for all of us. So I was listening to myself earlier say I tell my clients either you get attorneys or I can't move forward. And that might sound harsh to my clients, but I remind them that I too get to decide if this process is working for me as the mediator and I go through that agreement at the beginning of my process with people so that they know that that is possible.
Karen Van Kooy:Does not happen often, but it is a possibility. Second thing I'm wondering, Jen, if I know in our mediation trainings and in our my early meetings with clients, I tell them I may caucus with you but you have to recognize I can't hold secrets. So if you tell me something and we're very focused on that like ethical dilemma of the mediator and I'm wondering how often someone shares in a caucus with you that they have that baby that nobody knew about or have that account in the Cayman Islands that they failed to disclose, because I don't think it happens that often.
Jen Hawthorne:So during my initial consultations with my mediation clients, I explain that I do it a little bit differently than what you just explained, Karen. I tell them that there are some things that I do not need to share with the other spouse. If we have a caucus and they reveal something and the examples that I give are if they tell me that someone's tone of voice is really hard for them that day, or the way that we're having a conversation is difficult because it's a conversation that they've had with their spouse many, many times and it's just repeating patterns of resentment or frustration or whatever it is that it's bringing up these feelings and making it hard to have a productive conversation. That's really helpful for me to know, because it's my job to change the dynamic of the conversation. That's not helpful for the other person to know and, in fact, it could be harmful to the process. However, you use my classic example in what you were just saying.
Jen Hawthorne:I tell clients if you come into a caucus with me and you start talking about this bank account in the Cayman Islands that your grandmother left to you, that you had before the marriage, that your spouse has never known about and you don't want to talk about it, I'm going to need to tell you that's not how mediation works.
Jen Hawthorne:You have to make a full disclosure.
Jen Hawthorne:Disclosure doesn't mean division. Just because you disclose something doesn't mean it's going to be divided. It doesn't mean it's not going to be divided, but it has to be discussed and disclosed, and there's a lot of gray area in between those two examples, and so my policy is that if someone says something to me in a caucus and they're saying please don't tell my spouse or my co-parent, I would ask them why? Why do you want to share this with me, but you don't want the other person to know? And then we have a full conversation about that, and ultimately, if it's something that could in any way look as if I wasn't being transparent about a really material issue to the outcome of the divorce, then we're going to talk about how are you going to tell your spouse about this, how am I going to tell your spouse about this, what's the best way to share the information, or I'm going to have to withdraw, but I do leave space for that little bit of conversation that doesn't require transparency, and sometimes I think that's where the control, coercion stuff lands.
Karen Van Kooy:Yeah, absolutely.
Jen Hawthorne:Is it someone saying I don't have the power, or I don't know how to voice this, or I don't know how to have this conversation, and so there's a tiny element of our job that is a little bit like coaching, and obviously, if someone needs a lot of that, a referral to a divorce coach or a therapist or a divorce attorney depending on the issues and what they're really struggling with makes a ton of sense.
Karen Van Kooy:Yeah.
Patrice Brymner:Yeah, that's a really good illustration of how to effectively use caucusing and how that can address the coercion or pressure aspect. I also want to go back to I think, Karen, you mentioned you know on a collaborative team, how that might play out differently, and one of the things I like around this issue in a collaborative case is how the collaborative model can be tailored to a situation and to particular clients and like. So. This last conversation was about how mediation could be tailored and how you can change, how you might do things to address it, and so I'm hoping we can talk about what that looks like in collaborative and it's possible outside of these process choices, like if you were doing attorney to attorney negotiation, even in a litigated case. Some of these things are possible there too. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of attorneys trained in this that work outside of dispute resolution, but anyway, so in a collaborative case, how might a team address coercion or control or imbalance that they see between parties?
Karen Van Kooy:One of the first things that comes to mind is the importance of the role of the coach facilitator, and I have the honor of working with some really good coach facilitators who I don't even have to worry about paying attention to this dynamic because they are so in touch with it and explain to me or point out to me that it's happening and then help strategize with me. If it's my client who's exerting pressure in some way or squashing conversation, they help me think through how to talk to my client about it. And, like you said, Jen, I often find that there are some clients who that is their 100% motivation. That's what they intended to do, that's what they're going to keep intending to do, despite what they say to me. But there are other people who don't realize how they're coming across and they do recognize the benefit of both of them mutually agreeing to something, because then they know going forward they can rely on those decisions.
Karen Van Kooy:So I have had the help of coaches work with my clients. When I see it, I'm a pretty direct attorney, so people who need a very soft sort of around circumnavigation of issues they're not going to really resonate with working with me. I often, when I see it happening either way. If my client I feel like my client is acquiescing or I feel like my client is exerting some kind of pressure, I'll ask for a breakout room. Now that we're doing them on Zoom or when we were in person all the time, we'll step out into another conference room and just really go over my observations and just say, hey, I'm seeing this and it's making me feel this way. What do you think your spouse or partner or co-parent is? How they're experiencing this and do you think that's going to help you get them?
Karen Van Kooy:to your point of view or come to an agreement that works for both of you.
Patrice Brymner:Yeah, and so just the tools that we have in a collaborative case to and doing things virtually. That use of breakout rooms has been so key and it's, I find it. I just want to touch on that briefly. I find it easier on Zoom to do that than in person because there's just an ease to being able to pop out and pop back in and spend five minutes with your client to kind of check in when you're seeing something like that, and also the team can do that.
Patrice Brymner:So in the middle of a meeting the team might someone, one of the professionals might say I'd like a moment with the team, I want to check in, or I want to have the coach come in and talk to me and my client.
Patrice Brymner:So there are any number of combinations of folks who can have that conversation kind of on the fly and then after the meeting in a debrief, the professional team can reflect on as you can with your client also, but the team can reflect on how well that meeting went and what the issues were and how to adjust moving forward. I think the tricky part is when a collaborative case has been adjusted in process style or in meeting style to maybe not include a coach. So I'm hoping we can touch on that a little bit, because it's one of the benefits of collaborative right. It's enormously flexible and we can tailor it to the needs of the parties. But when we lose the neutral which you would have in mediation right, You're going to have a mediator, a neutral mediator, throughout mediation, but when you lose the neutral, you really do, I think, lose some of that ability to address this.
Karen Van Kooy:Absolutely. I mean, as you develop in your career, hopefully you tailor your career to match what's going to bring you pleasure and joy. And in the early years I was so desperate to get a case that if the clients balked at the coach because they didn't want to spend money, or in one really unfortunate case myself and the other attorney allowed the clients to sort of fire the coach mid-process and the case tanked because they needed it. So I don't do cases now where there isn't a coach. I understand that and I think I share your approaches where I try to be as flexible as possible but I also decide.
Karen Van Kooy:Here's what works for me, given what I know about my own style and my own strengths and my own weaknesses. And I, like I said, I'm very direct and it was not hard for me to learn to be an adversarial attorney. My name, my nickname in my family when I was three years old was the little general. So I was very accustomed to making decisions and letting people know what they should be doing and I have spent my entire life trying to unlearn those patterns and ways of being and it is still always a challenge for me. So it's very important for me to know there's a neutral who's going to help me stay alert, stay open and not become more. On the advocacy unproductive advocacy. There's always a requirement for advocacy, but it can be unproductive.
Patrice Brymner:One permutation of this that I've recently experienced that worked really well, because sometimes in a collaborative case, being in those meetings can become counterproductive, right? So being in collaborative meetings can become counterproductive for some clients because they just can't continue to talk to each other for whatever reason. And then we adjust. So I recently concluded a case where we stopped meeting but the coach was not released. So the coach remained a part of the team and the professionals continued to talk with each other, even though we didn't have meetings for several months in a traditional collaborative way, and the coach every once in a while would write to the two attorneys and say you know, since we're not meeting anymore, should I send back my retainer and am I done? And we're like no, we need you. And we continued to use that coach as individuals, or the three of us, either through phone calls or email or whatever, and it was invaluable to have access to that coach. So lots of ways to do it.
Jen Hawthorne:From my perspective, I agree with lots of what's been said by both Patrice and Karen.
Jen Hawthorne:I think collaborative is very flexible and where I draw the line in calling something a collaborative case for me, there has to be a coach and there has to be a disqualification clause for the attorneys.
Jen Hawthorne:If either of those things are missing, I want my client to know right up front this is a lawyer to lawyer negotiation.
Jen Hawthorne:That might end up looking very much like a collaborative case because, especially if it is one of my amazing collaborative colleagues on the other side, I know we're very likely to stick to very open four-way conversations, complete and full disclosure and willingness to share information and to work together to problem solve. But it's still not a collaborative case because some the three of us sitting here are very unlikely to be attorneys that go to court on behalf of a client in a lawyer to lawyer negotiation. But there are a lot of our colleagues that do both, that do still have litigation cases and do collaborative cases and without that disqualification clause it's unpredictable what could happen in the future. And without the coach you're just lacking that full team support and so I really want clients to understand I'm willing to do those cases and sometimes they have really great outcomes and might even be more efficient and more productive than doing the full collaborative process because of the client's needs. But it's not a collaborative case and I think that's an important distinction.
Karen Van Kooy:Good point, Jen, I was about to jump onto another topic. Well, that word coercion keeps coming up and in my brain, and I'm thinking about the times where I feel like I am exhibiting coercive behavior or the other client is exhibiting coercive behavior. And sometimes, for me, what I would say about what the pressure is that pushes me there is when the clients are really concerned with time and money. So I want to meet that need and be efficient and effective, and yet they can't get two mutual decisions, so I don't have control over whether they can or can't. Yet my client's pressuring me to be efficient and effective. And so it's like well, make a decision.
Karen Van Kooy:And I get directed and sometimes to the point where I will say here's what I think you need to decide, here's what I think would be really good decisions on your behalf. But you do not have to take any of that advice. You are free to make whatever decisions you want and I will support you in them. I'm gonna lay out the pros and cons of that and then you decide, because it always has to be your decision. And I always wonder about people who are softer people than I am in those situations and how they often have ways of saying things that get clients to the same place without the corralling that I feel I do. So you two are on that end of the spectrum to varying degrees, so I'm curious how you handle those situations.
Jen Hawthorne:So I don't think, as I was listening to you, I don't think, and I might have former clients or current clients who disagree with what I'm about to say, but I try to stay away from ever saying I think this is what you should do in a decision-making capacity. I talk about that and I'll make suggestions to clients in a process perspective and things like that, but when it comes to decision-making, I sometimes couch it as this is something that I've seen that works well. In other cases. It might be something you wanna try and I usually will try to lay out a few options, and this is true whether I'm working with mediation clients or someone I'm representing. And then I moved to what you were discussing, karen, and I talk about pros and cons of each and I get their feedback and I try to get them to explore how each one feels.
Jen Hawthorne:And in terms of what I was thinking a few minutes ago when you were talking about people putting pressure on themselves because of time or money, that's where I try to remind people that the benefit of an out-of-court process is that you can come to temporary agreements throughout the process, pause the process, give yourself a chance to recover financially in the sense of not paying professionals for a little while, and it gives you the benefit of letting you try something on as a plan so that you can actually see does this work? And this is I'm talking for both people involved whether it's a mediation or a collaborative case or a lawyer-to-layer negotiation, it's again, it's where there's those like people sometimes put deadlines in their own mind, or where there's a court deadline, sort of forcing decision-making. If you don't have either of those things, there's lots of space to take breaks from the process, even if it feels like you need to be done for your own mental health. And I totally I've been there myself in that one. Sometimes having the option to try things on gets you to a better outcome that you can live with later.
Jen Hawthorne:And the other thing that I was thinking while you were speaking, karen, is when you start feeling the pressure because your client is saying this is too expensive or I need this to be done. Just remember it's not your duck, it's not your bottle. You're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. When you're offering all of those tools and the client is saying I can't make a decision, okay, well then you need more time. Like I know, you don't want it to take more time, but you need more time.
Karen Van Kooy:Yeah, it's harder when it's the other client who needs more time and your client is like I'm ready, yes, and then you have to like. Well, both of you need to come to a agreement and while you are happy with this if it were the outcome, you won't be happy with it as an outcome if the other person isn't also. Trust me on that, but that's a heap of faith for the client.
Jen Hawthorne:It absolutely is, and I think all three of us agree that we've seen cases where our client was the one who tried to force the other client to do something and how fast that can come back with repercussions.
Patrice Brymner:So, as I listened to you, Karen, my mind went to times when we might become the coercive or the pressuring body right, or the one maybe perceived as being pressuring when it's a situation in which our clients may be leaning towards like - so, I'm talking about like in a collaborative case, not when I'm a mediator, but when my client is starting to really lean heavily towards options that are really not in their own best interest, or whether it's substantive decisions about the settlement or just their behavior in the process is undermining their own interests, and that's when I feel like I start to apply pressure to try to correct for that or try to warn them. And you and I talked about this a little bit before we started recording and I think the difference between when I litigated and I was in situations like that I could apply pressure and I would feel a lot of responsibility for making sure that my client didn't undermine their own outcome. In collaborative, I have an opportunity to be more educational and to take the time to explain.
Patrice Brymner:If you choose this or continue down this path, here's what I think you know, based on my experience and I have a different view and bringing expertise and experience into this this is what will play out if you take, you know, sort of like door number one or door number two, door number three, and here's what I think is behind those doors. Now you choose and in very difficult you asked what we would do. I think situations maybe like that that might be different than what you would do as a more direct attorney. I sometimes I call you and say, Karen, what would you do? Because I want to hear, I want to know, like, what would that look like? And it's one of the benefits of being part of a community of trusted professionals that I get to reach out to people to say what would it look like If you know? How would you do it? It's educational for me.
Karen Van Kooy:You know when you were speaking, Jen, about the pausing I'm really going to. I think that has happened in cases of mine, but I haven't been explicit about it. I know, back in my early days of high conflict litigation practice I used to think that's how the time standards should be set up. You should a family's rupturing, go in and get temporary orders and then put a moratorium on stuff for a while and in some ways they do right. I mean, the rules say that you can't have a pretrial for six months. I just think that should have been longer, because people are so emotionally impacted by divorce, by the rupture in the family and the fabric, that it's really challenging for them to make good decisions from that emotional state.
Jen Hawthorne:Agreed my wrong, oh sorry.
Karen Van Kooy:So I've had cases where the client was very upset with it taking so long but by the end realized I could not have gotten here if I had tried to do that eight months earlier or six months, you know.
Jen Hawthorne:I think one of the and this is maybe falls into the vein of sometimes people use this in a coercive way I think one of the most important things people should do and this is completely different than what a lot of litigation attorneys would say potentially is move apart. I think it is almost impossible to make long-term rational decisions about what your future life should look like when you're still living in the same house and especially when people are trying to co-parent and living out of joint bank accounts, like you. Just you lived in that state for too long in terms of the joint bank accounts usually, and you've possibly or likely only co-parented in the same house. You don't have enough information to make rational decisions unless you spend some time apart. That's my personal opinion.
Patrice Brymner:I've had cases with both of you that ended up with very long delays. So a collaborative case with you, Karen, and a amediation with you, Jen, that went on for much longer than I think anyone anticipated when the cases started and we ended up with Jen. In the case with you, we ended up with delays because of external circumstances right, medical things happening or moves or whatever. Or in a case with you, Karen, I think there was like a job and employment thing. So these outside interruptions can come and become the best thing because it stops the process and it gives people time to catch up and, like you're saying, to try on, like what does this new life feel like? And it's amazing what six months or longer can do. When you come back, the perspective shift, the priorities shift, discussions now become possible. That couldn't have happened in that, like you said, Karen, that rupturing the rupturing phase of an early divorce process is. It's obvious from the outside. I don't know what it looks like from the inside.
Jen Hawthorne:Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes we get back into a room with folks and it's like two completely different people because they have maybe not completely moved through the whole grief process but they're at an entirely different stage. And if they're I think this is true if they're past the anger denial stage, more rash, even if they're not fully at acceptance yet, more rational conversations can happen than in those earlier stages of grief and people really need to accept that they need time to go through that process Right.
Karen Van Kooy:And I think I mean it's completely understandable to me as a person who does not like limbo. It's completely understandable that if you have such a violent rupture of the fabric of your life you want to clutch at, okay, what are the rules and regulations and what can I depend on which? So I think it's really important to have a really good temporary plan. What I would like to work on, having developed this wisdom about this over the years, is best practices, because one of the downfalls of that, I find, is for those cases that they really do need the time and it does happen, whether we have stated that or not A I think it's important to, as professionals, especially in a collaborative law case, be very conscious about not doing work that's not necessary during that time, to be really clear and organized about where you're pausing so that when you pick up, there's not an immense need to reread hundreds of emails and figure out where you are.
Karen Van Kooy:And, as is often the case with us as attorneys, new cases have come in and they have taken over priority, and so to have a best practices way to keep those paused cases on the radar screen, to move forward when ready. Sometimes they drag out and I think it's me as much as it's the clients who allow it to just hang out there. So it's a good area, I think, to explore and maybe do some advanced trainings on what would be best practices around embodying this notion into the process.
Patrice Brymner:I think that I fully support that.
Patrice Brymner:I would love to be involved in that and I also think, as I'm listening and I know we're kind of needing to wrap up on time now but another conversation we could have that conversation. We could do a podcast about that and specifically about how to best educate folks at the beginning of a process, whether it's collaborative or mediated to. They want to go fast. I can't tell you how many mediations, and I'm sure you hear it too. Can we get this done in three months? Can we do this in 90 days? What if we meet every week? What if we meet every other week? Will that be enough time? Let's get it done and they are still living together and they're still sharing everything. And how to start to educate people about the benefit of slowing down and what that can look like and provide them, maybe like you're talking about, Karen, like a known best practice. This is what I offer and here's why this is what we have found works the best for long term solutions. Long term, workable, practical, whether it's co-parenting or whatever it is.
Karen Van Kooy:Yeah.
Patrice Brymner:Yeah, it's hard to tell folks at the beginning. You'll be glad if it doesn't take three months.
Karen Van Kooy:Time is your friend here.
Patrice Brymner:Yes, Absolutely so. Thank you, Karen, for coming today. This has been a great conversation. I hope you'll come back. I hope that we can have you as a regular guest. This has been a great conversation.
Jen Hawthorne:Yeah, yeah, so let's keep talking, okay.