A fleeting fad?

With the government actively encouraging individuals to resolve family disputes through mediation rather than relying on the increasingly over-burdened court system, it would seem that Collaborative Family Law (CFL), a further alternative to litigation, has arrived on the scene at exactly the right time.

What is it?

CFL remains a relatively new concept to England and Wales and could be mistaken for being just one more form of alternative dispute resolution (or just “dispute resolution”, as we are now being encouraged to call it) to add to the many others that already exist. There is, however, perhaps more to CFL than to other methods of dispute resolution, which makes it stand out from the crowd and goes some way to explaining why family lawyers across the country have been undertaking the training required to enable them to practise Collaboratively. But, what exactly is CFL, how does it work and what are its potential benefits?

CFL is a process