Collaborative Return Form: Part 1

Collaborative Return Form: Part 2

Resolution set up its Collaborative Working Party (CWP) in March 2016, with the aim of engaging and supporting practitioners involved in collaborative work. The working party is interdisciplinary, to reflect the range of professionals working collaboratively; financial advisors, lawyers and therapeutic specialists.

Our main goals are:

• to help practitioners grow and develop their collaborative practice
• to support skills development by sharing best practices
• to promote communication with – and between – Practice and Organisational Development Groups (Pods) around the country.

We have also looked at how to develop the collaborative model into the future.

We started by launching a regular e-news bulletin which goes out to all our collaboratively-trained members, as well as financial advisers and family consultants. This communication initiative is designed not only to share what we’re doing, but to invite feedback, input and ideas from our members. The e-news has been well received with a very good open rate. If you’d like to be added to the distribution list, please get in touch.

We’re always keen to hear your news, questions, experience and needs so we can feed them into our workstreams and support you in your practice.

We ran a successful Pod Liaison Officer’s (PLO) Day in March with a focus on exercises and interactive discussions. The content has been made available to all members on our online learning platform, Learn Resolution. We firmly believe that the wealth of experience and ideas you all bring to bear in practising the collaborative model out there is invaluable. PLO days and Pod meetings are a great opportunity to share your knowledge and think about new ways to address problems and challenges you may be experiencing in your practice.

One area the CWP would like to focus on is how to reach more collaborative clients, spreading the word to the public and practitioners about how effective this process can be. The PLO Day focused on how to market the collaborative message to more clients, and we’d like to bring this message to Pods directly too. The CWP members are happy to visit Pods – please contact Ian or Tasha to arrange a date.

Your feedback on the collaborative return form, participation agreement and views on how arbitration can be assimilated into a collaborative case is welcomed and valued. We will be looking at the collaborative practice documents to see how they can be improved.

It has been lovely to see so many articles being contributed to The Review and we would welcome more. If you’d like to discuss your idea for an article, please get in touch.

We’ve also been involved in a collaborative presentation to the Isle of Man Law Society’s inaugural Family Law Conference, arranging regional collaborative events and participating in both the Northern Lights Conference and Resolution’s DR Conference in Nottingham.

Our message is simple: we want to help you do more of the work you want to do, because it helps make our clients’ lives better. All of us chose family law because we want to help people, and so many more separating families could benefit from using the collaborative model.  Our aim is to support and grow a thriving community of collaborative professionals who believe in working co-operatively to promote the best interests of our family law clients.

The Collaborative Working Party members are: Tasha Bevan-Stewart (Co-Chair), Ian Hawkins (Co-Chair), Jo Edwards, David Emmerson (Chair of the DR Committee), William Hogg, Bernadette Hoy, Angela Lake-Carroll, Mary Shaw, Mary Waring and Alice Wightman. The staff contact for any queries is Louisa Grisdale (DR Services Manager).