Collaborative Divorce w/ Attorney Chris Farish

Chris Farish is a past president of the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals, which is an international organization charged with helping families, find a more constructive way to resolve disputes. He also is active in the collaborative movement here in Texas. He is the vice president of the family law section for the collaborative law of the state bar of Texas and also has served as a past chair of the family law section for the Dallas Bar Association. Chris is often recognized for his work and family law by his peers being listed on some of the best-known lists such as best lawyers for collaborative law and family law, and also Texas Super Lawyers.

Jennifer Hargrave:

Thank you Chris, for coming to join me today to talk about collaborative divorce.

Chris Farish: 

Well thanks for having me Jennifer, I appreciate it.

JH: 

One of the questions I want to start of asking you is, why do you believe collaborative divorce is best for families?

CF: 

Well, collaborative divorce is a different process. It allows families the opportunity to really craft their own resolution. The problem with courts is the fact that you’re taking what is intrinsically, an emotional and personal issue, involving families and children and how you’re going to co-parent in the future and you’re just throwing that on the feet of a third party who’s never met you and will never be involved in your family again. In all likelihood, you can have your divorce action in front of a judge. And if you ever needed to modify that, it would be a completely different judge, who wouldn’t know you who’s making changes to what the first judge did. This process allows families to sit down and actually talk to one another, work through their differences and find a way to move forward. It creates more lasting and more sustainable resolution.

JH: 

One of the things I love about the collaborative divorce process is what you were just touching on about going to the courtroom when we’re not in a collaborative case and your kind of airing all the dirty laundry of the family. And you think about the lasting impact that has on couples who have to think and try co-parent with each other after they’ve told the whole world how horrible they are. And, of course, these days things are being broadcast on YouTube, so it’s even more public. And in collaborative, really afford some privacy for families to work out those issues without having to have everybody in your business.

CF: 

Well, it’s amazing. The fact that families would ever want to go into a courtroom and literally engage in a zero-sum game, there’s no winner. There is no loser, everybody loses if you’re in the middle of a courtroom and you’re just completely disparaging someone who you’re going to have to deal with for the rest of your life. I mean, there are times and there are places where court is the only way to go about it. But in general, if you’re going to raise your children together for the rest of your life, there’s going to be birthdays, graduations, weddings, family get-togethers, reunions, all of those things. You don’t have to be best friends with your ex, but you do need to be able to coexist in co-parent. And the best way to do that is to actually try and come to a meeting of the minds and craft a resolution that’s going to work for you.

JH: 

I couldn’t agree more. You know, a lot of people will say, okay, well, that sounds good. That we’re going to be able to craft a settlement, but we don’t see eye-to-eye on anything. We can’t agree on anything, which is one of the biggest misconceptions about collaborative divorce. How can the collaborative divorce process, help us reach a resolution when it feels like that’s just not a possibility.

CF: 

Well, the fact of the matter is it’s still going to be better than what the court can do. Because you may not see eye-to-eye with your spouse and you may want a divorce and you may be fed up with dealing with their stuff, but you still know your spouse better than the judge is ever going to know your spouse. You still know your children better than the judges ever going to know your children. And if you can put aside kind of those feelings about your spouse that you may or may not, feel all that great about and say, you know what, we need to craft something that’s going to work.

You’re eventually going to be able to see options that are going to fit together even if y’all don’t agree, you’re going to surround yourself with a team of four professionals who have immense amounts of experience in this process who are going to say, look, here’s an option. Here’s an option. Here’s an option. Y’all don’t agree. But what y’all don’t agree with these options fit on both sides of that and all of a sudden these light bulbs go off for clients and they’re like, oh my gosh I didn’t even realize that even though we don’t agree, we can still agree on this working.

With this collaborative approach you have a wide set of tools

JH: 

That’s one of the things I think is so brilliant about the collaborative divorce process is the fact that it isn’t dependent upon just the two of you to come up with solutions but you actually are working with people who do this day in and day out like, you and me right? And with a collaborative divorce you can have a mental health professional and with a financial professional who together the team can really help you brainstorm options and come up with different kinds of solutions. And I think you get a much better outcome than just trying to hammer at each other and tell them the weakest one concedes.

CF: 

Well, absolutely. I mean in a litigation process you hire experts and your experts are there to forward your agenda, you hire a financial expert and that expert creates a financial profile of businesses or tracing assets, or whatever that forwards, whatever your agenda is. In the collaborative process, you hire a neutral Financial professional, who gathers, all the information and then educates everyone, the lawyers, both clients, even your mental health, professional your mental health professional is there to help you craft that parenting plan, that co-parenting plan that’s going to be sustainable in the future and gives you years and years of experience, you can bring in a child specialist and give your children a voice in the room. Not a vote, but a voice in the room. It’s the only process where you have four or five professionals, who are entirely dedicated to helping you resolve, the conflict rather than helping you to escalate the conflict.

What is the collaborative commitment?

JH: 

So, let’s talk about that dedication for a moment, because one of the unique things about the collaborative divorce process is what we call the collaborative commitment, which is the professionals are actually committing to help resolve the conflict as well. And one of the pushbacks that gets especially from other lawyers is because if the case doesn’t settle, then the parties have to fire their lawyers and start over. How do you see the collaborative commitment, really helping families in this process?

CF: 

Well, like I said, the collaborative commitment creates that push for, four professionals to be solely focused on resolution. Because they cannot say, hey, let’s throw this all away. Throw the baby out with the bathwater and let’s run to the courthouse and do whatever. It removes the Sword of Damocles that hangs over any negotiations in a litigation case, which is, we can just run to the courthouse if we can’t agree. It’s either my way or the highway.

Instead, lawyers are forced to be creative, lawyers are forced to actually use their creativity and their experience and say you know what? This may not feel right to you but let’s see. This is something I’ve seen somebody else do, does that sound like an option that would work for you, or how about this? Or how about that. And we start bouncing all these ideas off of each other based on our experience because we’re invested in getting the family to a resolution that’s going to be lasting and sustainable moving forward. The collaborative commitment is what creates that, it’s not a commitment by the lawyers per se. It is a contract between the parties, it is a contract between the clients to come together and say, you know what, we don’t want to go to court, we don’t want to pull our family into the courtroom and throw everything at the feet of a judge.

We want to do this a different way and part of doing it a different way is committing our attorneys who we’ve selected because we believe they’re going to represent our interests. We’re going to commit them to this process, and we’re going to prevent them from trying to run to the courthouse. And that’s the contractual agreement. That’s the collaborative commitment that these clients are entering into. And to me, it is one of the most unique things that I’ve ever seen in the law.

JH: 

I couldn’t agree more. I think there’s a real paradigm shift that happens because in a traditional divorce setting usually, people think of their lawyers as battling it out and fighting against each other and just escalating the conflict. But in a collaborative setting, really we’re laying down our own weapons. And we’re working with each other to come up with those creative solutions. And I think it carries with it just a whole different tenor and so it is actually good for lawyers to get along, especially in the collaborative process, right?

CF: 

Right.

JH: 

And I think that’s one of the joys of getting to practice with wonderful professionals like you, who really care about the work that you’re doing with families. All right. Talk to us a little bit about the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals, what is that?

CF: 

So the IACP is an international organization. It’s a 501. C, 3, nonprofit corporation in the U.S. we are based in California, but we are charged with creating a collaborative community that will help families to be able to resolve their disputes in a consensual way. We are committed to forwarding, not only collaborative practice, primarily collaborative practice, but really any consensual dispute resolution model.

Anyway that families can come together and resolve their disputes in a way that does not involve a third-party arbiter of any sort and we engage in training for professionals, we engage in public education. We train all over the world. As the president of the IACP, I traveled to Malaysia and presented and Hong Kong and presented and Sao Paulo, Brazil, and presented at an International Conference there. It’s truly an amazing organization. Just reaching out around the world.

We just finished our forum last night, we have an annual forum, and this year, It was a virtual forum which is always interesting. We took, what is normally a four-day, five-day event and turned it into a 10-day event. And we wrapped it up last night and it was really amazing to sit in these three hours, Zoom presentations going into breakout rooms, and having conversations with people all over the world. I had people from Malaysia and Hong Kong and Italy, and Brazil and all of these folks in these little breakout rooms in this preformed Institute, learning situations and it’s just amazing that they all took the time to sit down and say I want to learn more about collaborative practice. I want to learn from some of the leading practitioners in the world and in the fact that the organization was able to put that together and bring it to people and we had 600 registrants.

JH: 

That’s amazing.

Watch the rest of the interview on our Youtube channel!