FORREST MOSTEN'S COLLABORATIVE DIVORCE HANDBOOK: EFFECTIVELY HELPING DIVORCING FAMILIES WITHOUT GOING TO COURT—THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF COLLABORATIVE LAW

Abstract

Mosten has been an outstanding advocate over many decades for family mediation, unbundled legal services (where lawyers offer discrete advice and assistance to clients, rather than taking carriage of their entire file) and now collaborative divorce. His experience has made him an effective advocate and trainer in these and other innovative areas of dispute resolution practice, and here he brings that wide and deep experience to the relatively new practice area of collaborative divorce. Mosten is clear about his goals for this book, just as he encourages others to be clear about their practice goals and vision. He wishes to share his personal experience of the power of collaborative divorce in order to inspire those already working in this area—as well as to motivate those who are considering whether to expand their practice to include collaborative divorce. The book is designed—and works best—as a comprehensive manual which walks a legal practitioner through the process of collaborative divorce. Each chapter is devoted to a different phase of the process and includes valuable checklists and “how to” information which only an experienced practitioner can provide. Mosten draws on his accumulated wisdom of many years of working through conflicts with clients both inside and outside a court setting—and it shows. For example, he suggests the ”court field trip” for a prospective divorce client—sending them down to the local family court to see for themselves how things work at the courthouse. Mosten’s experience as a practitioner is also evident in his description of especially challenging aspects of the collaborative process—for example, when the parties appear to be at impasse (Mosten suggests a “joint proposal process”), or where there is a dispute over the disclosure of necessary information (which is undertaken voluntarily in a collaborative model)—and suggests how to face these situations with effective tools and techniques. Mosten first places this practical coaching within a conceptual context. The first chapter of the book is devoted to what he describes as the “paradigm shift” that collaborative divorce implies for lawyers. Mosten’s focus here is on the ways in which the approach of collaborative practice changes the underlying power dynamic between lawyer and client, with the client taking more responsibility for