How we ended up building a divorce method that didn’t exist.
The legal industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Lawyers are famously risk averse.
You likely wouldn’t hire a divorce attorney who quoted the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things” as the way they would handle your divorce.
So when Rebecca and I started taking Redefining Family from idea to reality, we had to ask ourselves – if there is literally nothing on the market that provides the care and support we envision, how do we innovate what is - at its core - a legal process?
Obviously, we had no interest in dragging families or ourselves into family court. That was a no brainer.
We knew we would be focused on non-litigation processes – collaborative divorce, mediation, and divorce coaching.
But which one? What would the average lawyer do? They’d research and pick the best one. But, if you know us, we aren’t average lawyers.
So we became trained and certified in all of them.
Here is a breakdown of the modern landscape of divorce resources outside of court.
Collaborative Divorce, which has been around for about 30 years, is promising and positive.
It avoids court and traditional litigation tactics.
It acknowledges that divorce is more than just a legal process by providing the clients financial and mental health support in addition to the friendlier, “collaborative” legal support.
The downside is that divorcing spouses are still expected to manage the process. Plus, the professional team is usually assembled ad hoc, making the process even more challenging to manage.
Mediation, which is the oldest and most established litigation alternative, has been around for about 50 years at this point. But it sits oddly in the legal profession hierarchy.
In big firms, you really only see people retire into being mediators. And most states, including California, either require no training or very minimal training to become a mediator.
At worst, mediation puts two emotionally dysregulated, high conflict spouses into a room and asks them to the start negotiating the hardest deal they’ve ever had to make, with a referee they may only have emailed a few times.
Now, before we trash talk mediation too much, at best, it’s great.
If you happen to be lucky enough to be trained by Woody Mosten – you've seen a real artist at work. Our point is, when it’s done right, mediation is solid. It just isn’t always done right.
Finally, there’s divorce coaching.
It has been around less than 30 years, with the first certification program only being around 15 years old.
It is the newest divorce service offering and attempts to fill the gaps left between the more traditional legal and then sometimes financial and mental health services being provided to divorcing couples.
Divorce coaches can be great. Rebecca and I were certified by Pegotty Cooper’s program and we can attest to the training being rigorous and multidisciplinary.
But the divorce coach is still an add-on to a process that the divorcing spouses ultimately remain responsible for.
And divorce coaches are rarely attorneys or mediators and vary widely in their backgrounds and experience.
As we worked through the trainings, it became clear that we would need to take the best from each to provide divorcing families the support and care we strongly believe they need and deserve.
But why had no one done this already? Some of the simplest entrepreneurial advice is to “find a need and fill it.”
Rebecca and I have the unique privilege of understanding the need (we divorced ourselves with little help and have learned to peacefully co-parent our kids) and having the rare combination of abilities to fill the need (both elite attorneys, both experienced start-up executives, both high EQ humans to handle the emotionality of this very human crisis, and understand the experience of both divorcing spouses).
So we designed the program we would have wanted to follow if it had been available when we divorced – the Integrated Divorce Method.
For the first time, our method acknowledges and supports all aspects of divorce - legal, financial, emotional, social, and co-parenting - in one place.
We project manage the entire process and minimize common missteps.
This is legal innovation – the Integrated Divorce Method by Redefining Family.
No one else does it…because no one else can.