The Solicitors Family Law Association (SFLA) has endorsed a group of practitioners offering negotiation rather than mediation to settle disputes between separating couples without going to court.

Collaborative Family Law is a grouping of 100 solicitors in England who have been trained over two days in the technique by one of its US pioneers.


Bradley: face-to-face meeting

Charlotte Bradley, a partner at City firm Kingsley Napley and one of the founders of the group a year ago, said solicitors and clients meet face to face to try to agree a settlement. The aim is to encourage partners to communicate, and to allow other trained counsellors to be involved as well.

She said collaborative family law is more than a new name for what enlightened family practitioners have been doing for years. 'The difference is that the process is agreed at the start between the two sides, and the first meeting of two clients and their lawyers is arranged before correspondence and phone calls between the two solicitors begins,' she explained.


Under the conventional process, the first roundtable meeting will usually not take place until a problem has emerged, she said. The recent Green Paper on parental separation commits the government to pilots based on the collaborative law approach.


Both sides agree before the start not to go to court unless the process collapses. The use of the new procedures will be limited in the short term by the small percentage of trained solicitors so far out of the 5,000 SFLA members. The collaborative process can only take place where both sides are represented by trained and paid-up members of the group.