The Colorado Bar Association’s ethics committee declared that collaborative law is unethical.

“A Warning to Collaborators – Colorado bar ethics panel takes aim at a growing ADR practice”, written by Jill Schachner Chanen, published in the ABA Journal, May 2007, reports that in February 2007, the Colorado Bar Association’s ethics committee declared that collaborative law is unethical [see: Ethics Opinion 115: Ethical Considerations in the Collaborative and Cooperative Law Contexts, 02/24/07].

Under collaborative law practice, the lawyers and the parties agree in a “four-way agreement” that if the dispute / divorce is not settled, then the attorneys will be prohibited from representing their clients in court, and the parties will have to retain new lawyers (and incur the additional expense for the new lawyers to be “brought up to speed”). The rationale for this agreement is to encourage the parties to settle.

The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals provides support to lawyers who participate in the collaborative law movement.

An offshoot of collaborative law is cooperative law, which does not require the “four-way agreement,” thus excluding the lawyers from any contractual obligation to withdraw — however, the parties may enter into an agreement, by which the parties may agree not to use their “cooperative” attorneys for litigation purposes.

New Jersey has given some guidance on the issue of Collaborative Law through Opinion 699 of the Advisory Committee on Professional Ethics [see my prior post on this HERE.].

NOTE: My legal and mediation services are offered to Polish-speaking and other clients in Union, Middlesex, Somerset, Essex, Hudson, Bergen, and Morris counties in NJ.

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