The Family Law Section of The Florida Bar set out its legislative agenda for the next year. Each year the section chooses five pieces of legislation to lobby. Next year one of those five pieces will be to add a collaborative law section to Chapter 61 of the Florida Statutes. You can see the entire bill and the background information here.
The goal ... is to encourage parties and their collaborative lawyers to focus on problem solving rather than positional negotiations.
The overall goal of the Collaborative Process Act is to support the continued
development and growth of collaborative process by making it a more uniform, accessible
dispute resolution option for parties. The collaborative process has thus far largely been practiced under the auspices of private collaborative participation agreements developed by private practice groups.
Collaborative practice will continue to be a voluntary process but the courts will have authority to enforce the collaborative participation agreement provisions such as disqualification.
Specifically, the goals are to:
• establish minimum terms for the form and provisions of collaborative participation
agreements;
• specify when and how a collaborative process begins and is terminated;
• describe the appropriate relationship between collaborative process and the civil justice
system when the collaborative process is used to attempt to resolve proceedings pending in court;
• extend the disqualification requirement to matters “substantially related” to that
submitted to a collaborative law process by parties, imputes it to the law firm of a
collaborative lawyer, and empowers courts to enforce it in a pending proceeding without
a separate action for breach of contract;
• meet the reasonable expectations of parties and counsel for confidentiality of
communications during the collaborative process by creating an evidentiary privilege
provisions for such communications; and
• give courts discretion to enforce agreements, the disqualification requirement and the
evidentiary privilege provisions of the Act.
Check out the bill and let your state legislators know that you support collaborative law.
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