Managing the long-term financial and emotional consequences of decisions: Team Dynamic

We all know that separating couples face multiple challenges. When they walk into a practitioner’s office, or appear for the first time on a screen, their heads are full of anxiety about numerous issues, often jumbled together. It is the practitioner’s job to disentangle those anxieties, work out what we can do something about, and give them a plan to get through it, maybe giving them lists of counsellors, coaches, financial advisers along the way. But is this really the best way to support our clients to get to a better future?

Separating couples face three key challenges:

• managing the emotional aspects around the changes in their key relationships
• disentangling their finances
• understanding and working within the legalities of divorce and financial arrangements

We have had a vibrant collaborative community in York since 2005. As in other areas, things changed during the Covid pandemic. Unlike in some areas, we have maintained a conviction, based on many years of positive experience, that collaborative practice helps us to support separated families to better long-term financial and emotional outcomes much more effectively than litigation or endless practitioners’ correspondence. That’s why Resolution’s Code of Practice says what it says.

With a huge amount of inspiration and learning taken from others who have been doing this a lot longer than we have (thanks Hampshire and Melbourne!), we are evolving our own process which, from the very beginning, involves professionals, each with the skillsets best suited to providing support in each of the three key areas of challenge for separating families.

It’s not rocket science, but it does make for a very different client experience and, for us, more enjoyable and satisfying work. At the first enquiry, we simply ask the prospective client if they would be prepared to work with their soon-to-be ex as part of a team to get to an agreed settlement that works for them both going forward. We avoid using our technical jargon or naming processes. Our aim is to give reassurance that they will get where they need to be with the right support for the right issues.

A clear focus in this initial conversation is to explore the impact that decisions made in the short term will have on the long-term future of the client, their children and wider family. We ask the client to consider whether they can and should place more importance on the value of future stability and peace over positions and “quick wins”. We reassure them that they will get the advice they need to retain control over decisions that will affect the family for many years to come. Clients often come in bewildered and leave with a sense of confidence that they can start to look to the future with some confidence.

Relationships within the professional team are key. We have worked together as a lawyer/IFA or mediator/IFA team for many years. This newer initiative has enabled us to recognise and develop new aspects of that relationship for the mutual benefit of the clients and ourselves as professionals. The full team – lawyer, financial neutral and coaches – completes the skillset. However, we would like to focus on how the interaction between lawyer and IFA is of particular benefit to the client.

The financial neutral, as the name suggests, works impartially in the joint interests of the couple. They manage the process of financial disclosure, keeping the lawyers informed but not directly involved. They provide summaries and start to build the cashflow plans which will be used in the joint meetings.

For lawyers this is strange. If you don’t relish conversations about minute detail it is liberating. It is also immensely helpful in avoiding unnecessary conflict. Requests for information no longer come from “the other side”. Instead of suspicion around why information is being requested, there is a focus on the financial reality, something which can be enormously helpful in looking to the future.

Cashflow plans, presented by the financial neutral, are a very effective way of getting clients to understand the long-term outcomes of different settlement options, emphasising how important the decisions made during the process will be to their future long-term peace and security, exactly as our Code of Practice encourages us to do. The financial neutral will present the plans at five-way meetings involving the couple and both lawyers, so that options are considered and developed in the context of the legal realities, and clients get the legal advice they need. The meetings are led by the neutral, promoting a real focus on problem solving and away from conflict.

Helping clients to be fully involved in agreeing their own settlement, which is future-focused and reality tested, is a very rewarding and satisfying way to work. Meetings are fewer and more focused. They are not all sweetness and light. We each have our job to do with the usual challenges. But our experience is that teamwork has real and lasting benefits for separating couples. The parting words of one client in our first team case in York, a consultant surgeon, were: “It has been a pleasure working with a group of people who all take their professions as seriously as I take mine.” Wouldn’t it be good to hear that at the end of every case?

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