I ‘discovered’ Collaborative Practice in 1999.  Of course it was only ‘new’ to me.  Stu Webb had started the ball rolling in the late 1980s. Most of what appealed to me about it was that it offered a way to work with people that did NOT involve the courts.  Instead it focused solely on helping them to reach decisions they could both live with.  Whether or not one of them was ‘right’ was irrelevant.  What some third party – a judge or a legislature – thought did not have to determine the outcome for them. To me this was huge.  It was a large part of what Stu and others were calling the Paradigm...

What do we think about as practitioners when we consider adding or maintaining a collaborative component to our overall law practice? Certainly there are the basic considerations of marketing and cost-effectiveness that make any practice component financially justifiable and for many, the analysis may end there. Beyond that, however, there is the lure of creating alternatives that support and empower a client through a difficult time. I’m writing here of a collaborative practice that permits the practitioner to reach deep into one’s self to access curiosity, generosity and empathy in order to create solutions that satisfy not only the...

It was 2010 and a few of us who had just ‘retired’ from the Editorial Board of IACP’s Collaborative Review were debriefing and talking about what we might do next to support the growth of Collaborative Practice.  Talk led to ideas and more talk and before we knew it, Gloria and I were in agreement that an online magazine could be a valuable complement to The Review. We saw it – as available to anyone to read; as being appealing to the general public as well as the Collaborative community; as publishing pieces that were the entire range from blog posts to serious academia; as providing a venue for a broad range of...