What We’ll Talk About and Why

In this series of unstructured conversations, we’ll look at one of the most persistent problems faced by the collaborative community: in thirty years, we have made little progress toward realizing our movement’s mission: changing how divorce is understood and handled worldwide.

Collaborative Divorce remains largely invisible to the cultures we all live in. In the United States, most lawyers and judges outside the domain of family law don’t know we exist. They make referrals to the most aggressive divorce lawyers, believing this is helpful and remaining unaware of the consequent harms that can result. Most mental health professionals who don’t do Collaborative Divorce are ignorant of our work; they don’t refer their clients to collaborative lawyers, though they would if they knew what we do. Religious leaders, who surely ought to value our child-focused, respectful, values-based team approach to divorce, don’t know anything about us.

The same seems to be true in most other countries where Collaborative Divorce is available. This program seeks new solutions to the problem.

June 22 at 10:00 AM
Bill, an entrepreneur and a wealth manager at Parallel Advisors in San Francisco, California, will discuss with Pauline Tesler the disastrous impact of adversarial divorce on family wealth, the value of referring his clients to collaborative lawyers, and how to inform the wealth managers in your community about the benefits of Collaborative Divorce.

June 24 at 10:00 AM
Harold, a realtor at Sotheby’s International Realty in San Francisco specializing in high-end residential real estate, is certified as an expert in assisting divorcing couples with real estate sales. A Belgium native fluent in four languages, he will talk with Pauline about the challenges of helping couples in poorly-managed divorces to sell their homes and the consequent reduction in value of what is often the major asset owned by the family. Bringing additional expertise from his years at Yahoo working in marketing and business development, Harold will give his perspectives on how to inform the real estate profession in your community about the value to them of making early referrals to collaborative lawyers.

June 26 at 10:00 AM
Cynthia is founding director of the Bay Area Legal Incubator, a social justice advocate, and a lecturer at Berkeley Law/University of California-Berkeley. She will talk with Pauline about the many potential benefits for young lawyers as well as for the Collaborative Divorce community of reaching out to the legal incubator movement. Collaborative professionals are largely white and greying; lawyers in the incubators are mostly quite young and diverse economically as well as racially and ethnically. They are learning how to build viable solo practices; we can provide them with a much-needed skillset and a community of colleagues who need them and are motivated to help them learn how to do it well.

June 29 at 10:00 AM
Ross, a retired Louisiana family law judge and catalyst of the Collaborative Divorce movement in that state, as well as a mediator, photographer, and public radio personality will discuss the many ways that local family law judges can help connect divorcing couples with collaborative professionals and can support the effectiveness of our work. He will suggest concrete ways of getting your local judges interested in and committed to Collaborative Divorce.

July 3 at 12:00 PM

Featuring:

– Rev. Joanne Whitt, Presbyterian pastor and Head of Staff (retired), First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo, California, and former lawyer.

– Furyu Nancy Schroeder, Zen Buddhist priest and Abiding Abbess at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm.

– Reb Irwin Keller, Spiritual Leader of Congregation Ner Shalom, Cotati, California; rabbinic student, teacher, writer, performer, gay rights advocate, and former lawyer.

Pauline will ask this diverse panel of religious leaders to consider how we can inform clergy about the importance to children, families, workplaces, and communities of encouraging their congregants to seek out Collaborative Divorce professionals when a breakup seems inevitable. She will invite panelists to share ideas about how to bring this information to religious leaders in their own faiths, as well as how to present the value of Collaborative Divorce to leaders in faiths where divorce itself may be an unwelcome subject.