Pruitt-Hamm Law and Mediation Services

The collaborative process has many redeeming values for the disputants. Primary among these is the ability to pace the divorce process to the needs of the parties. In litigation the court system is not concerned with the emotions or psychological status of the parties, only business matters involving money and assets and debts or those matters that involve the children. In contrast, in a collaborative divorce the attorneys and the neutrals who assist the parties are trained to be sensitive to the whole person, which includes not only ”business matters” but the emotional health and well being of each party as they transition through one of the most difficult events that can occur in ones life time.

In this case, the parties believed that they could productively discuss with each other, without having the attorneys or other neutrals present, but would simple need some time to do so. That time stretched from weeks to months to several years but the entire collaborative process was successfully completed with only two “joint meetings” and a host of telephone calls and attorney/client consultations. A facilitator was involved and proved critical to keeping one of the parties from terminating the process, resulting in a fully amicable and highly tailored result that met the unique needs and circumstances of the parties. This case demonstrates the old adage that warns against picking fruit before it is ripe. In litigation the emotional processes have their own pace which litigation timetables ignore.

When contemplating a divorce through the collaborative process, many people wonder if they might do better with traditional litigation. Such a question is ultimately difficult to answer because you can’t take the same case through both processes to have a direct comparison. However, this office was involved with one collaborative case that went all the way to settlement. However, before the final pleadings were signed one of the parties gave in to the impulse to seek a “second opinion” from a litigation attorney who promised great results…but ultimately failed to deliver. This case provides the best comparison available between the result from a collaborative process compared to going to court.

Collaborative: Through the collaborative process the parties reached a full resolution on troublesome issues involving property, spousal maintenance, child support with post-secondary support and a parenting plan. Through the collaborative process they actually discovered with the assistance of their financial neutral, an additional $50,000 in assets that they did not remember. If this had been traditional litigation, this asset would have been left out requiring the parties to come back for a second law suit after the divorce.

Litigation: In contrast, going through litigation the parties lost an additional $100,000 or more paying their litigation attorneys to take the matter through trial which took more than a year and involved a significant emotional cost in addition. The courts resolution was little different from that reached by the parties through the collaborative process, but was simply structured in a more traditional way. Ultimately, the parties themselves and their children lost significant financial and emotional gains by abandonment of the collaborative process.

Often attorneys who practice collaborative law believe and claim that divorces going through the collaborative process typically: 1) provide better results for the parties, 2) occur faster than litigation and 3) are significantly less costly than litigation.

This case confirms those claims.

In this case we were approached very shortly after a young single father was tragically electrocuted in a workplace accident, leaving his daughter orphaned and in the care of friends who had agreed to be the child’s godparents.  They came seeking help becoming her custodian.  Not only did we do that, but we helped these friends understand the importance of becoming the administrators of the father’s estate in probate and then prosecuting a personal injury case as estate administrators against the negligent parties, leading to one of the largest personal injury awards in Stevens County history of nearly $2 million.  The bulk of the award was placed in a staggered trust fund for the daughter to provide her with resources for schooling and counseling and to make the rest of her life a bit easier after a very traumatic childhood.

Children aren’t the only ones who sometimes need protection.  In this case an elderly mother, suffering from cognitive loss from stroke, was taken from the home of her daughter by a part-time caregiver. She handed the disabled elder off to her unemployed son-in-law who took her to Seattle to live with him, having the elder empty her bank account enroute.  Our client was another daughter who appealed for immediate help. Working on the weekend as well as weekdays we were able to obtain a Vulnerable Adult Protection Order restraining the son-in-law from contact and forcing him to give the elder back…in less than a week.  We also petitioned the court to establish a guardianship where our client could legally care for and protect her mother.  Although guardianships are typically uncontested they can involve issues of significant risk to vulnerable elderly.  We have experience with difficult cases like this and with the more typical guardianships.

This case involved child abduction to a foreign country, arrest by the FBI, securing a reversal of custody to the father, obtaining custody of the children by a writ of habeas corpus, criminal and contempt findings by the court and over 10 years of litigation.  Our client was the tragic victim of severe parental alienation and custodial abduction of his children by their mother.  Within days of entry of an agreed divorce and parenting plan this father could not find the mother or children in order to obtain his court-ordered visitation…because she had secretly abducted the children to Latin America where she kept them for 5 years!  He came to us for help and we stuck with him through 10 years of litigation, involving nationally recognized experts and eventually leading to the court placing the mother in jail indefinitely to compel obedience to the court’s orders.  This firm has dealt with tough cases such as this.  We can help you too.

A young mother hears a knock at the door. The police have come at 10 pm to take her infant child under a court order from another county…and deliver the baby to a man who is not the legal father!  It sounds like a script from a nightmare movie from Hollywood, but this actually happened to one of our clients.  Using remote technology Bruce Pruitt-Hamm, interrupting his vacation in Hawaii, directed the efforts of Ron Collins and staff for days to quash the court order.  Over the next several months we prevailed in keeping the baby with his mother, obtaining consent for her to move with the child and clarifying a complicated family arrangement where two men claimed to be the child’s father.