Forum PFI and Workshop Descriptions

Deepening our understanding of the personalities behind the people we interact with, greatly impacts the collaborative divorce process and its outcome.
The Enneagram model is a typology that defines nine major personality types . By using the Enneagram, we will deepen our understanding about the different personality based worldviews, perspectives, features and behaviors, advantages and limitations that characterize the different personality patterns of each type.
In this interactive workshop, after defining our own Enneagram type, we will explore the influence of our type, our collaborative team members' types and our clients' types on the collaborative process. This promotes understanding, which helps build cooperation and trust.
We will receive insights on how to work with each type effectively and receive tools to enhance our understanding and ability to deal with differences that arise due to the variance of personality perspectives. This variance affects negotiation styles, decision making, comfort zones, team work and the entire process.

As mediation and collaborative practice become more mainstream, we are handling  more high conflict,  challenging personalities and  intractable legal/financial issues.  In order to handle these  complex files , we are working in teams of advocates and neutrals and encountering the possibilities and the challenges  of neutrality and advocacy. In this workshop, we explore:
● the importance of each role and how we can capitalize on their strengths without stepping on one another’s toes
● how advocates are necessary to maintain neutrality and how neutrals are essential to allow advocacy in our toughest cases
● the importance of clarifying mandates and expectations at the outset
● vexing questions such as: Should neutrals raise questions that may benefit one side? Can neutrals meet or take instructions from one side? What is the obligation of the neutral when  the lawyers are imbalanced? What is the obligation of the lawyers when the neutral loses the perception of neutrality?  What if there is no trust between professionals, or between a client and any of the professionals?
● a practical tool for assessing and handling problems as they arise in a case
Through exploring the theoretical framework of advocacy and neutrality, the limitations of high needs clients in complex moments, our shared experience in recent cases, interactive case studies, and group discussion we will all leave this workshop better able to utilize the interplay of advocacy and neutrality in our settlement work.

The Uniform Collaborative Law Act and Rules have been pending in the United States since 2009.  18 states and D.C. have adopted them to date.  We will discus the status of the UCLA in the United States and how to help more states and other countries adopt uniform Collaborative laws and rules.

Within the next two decades the largest transfer of wealth from generation to generation in history will occur.  Collaborative interdisciplinary teams have a unique opportunity to impact this transfer while minimizing the impact on families.  This workshop will provide pragmatic tools to begin this work with a deeper understanding of both planning and post-mortem phases.

Working with high conflict couples requires a systemic lens.  Couple members mix with each other to create a more powerful interpersonal process than either alone create.  Workshop participants will learn to identify and understand the reactions and responses of the couple members, and skills to shape reactivity and resistance

In line with 2019’s theme, our workshop offers examples/tools for creating inspiring outcomes. Collaborative or not, divorce is divorce. Moving families forward and aligning the team requires intention and skill. We’ll discuss difficult cases, parties and situations in past cases, where the case evolved to produce an inspiring result.

Are Mediators and Collaborative Professionals competitors or natural partners?  In a highly interactive, engaged conversation, we compare and contrast CP and Mediation, explore how principles and techniques of each can be applied to the other, and delve into the convergence of the two models as “Collaborative Mediation.”

The presenters will lead an open discussion on the best options for proceeding when one professional is acting in a non-collaborative manner, when another professional arrives to a meeting unprepared, when the clients start splitting the team members, and other examples of unexpected roadblocks arising in Collaborative cases.

The Separation Proclamation is an intervention that reduces acrimony during and after divorce. It helps the person who chose the divorce to share their thinking so the other can start to understand. This intervention, developed in The Netherlands in the 1980s, is ubiquitous there. It helps clients achieve an acceptance of the divorce so they can focus on the future and transition into a new co-parenting relationship.

Like a symphony or ballet, collaborative practice seeks an artful timbre, pace and space—whether within the process as a whole, the full team meeting, or the immediate moment. Too often well-meaning professionals cacophonously crowd and hurry, when a client-centered process needs alternatively a press and a pause.

Collaborative Practice is like "improv". We have a general idea about what might happen in the collaborative meeting room but no matter how carefully we prepare, we don't get a dress rehearsal or a script. We are at our best when we can say "yes" to what is coming toward us and respond in an authentic, meaningful and productive way.
This workshop will help make your collaborations - with clients, team mates and even the supporting cast of characters - more like good improv. You do all the necessary preparation so that you can be present to what happens, without forcing or choreographing what you think should happen.  We will learn some tools to engage curiosity and acceptance of “the moment". We will practice noticing and responding, and will look at the benefits of transparency. The goal is to help prepare yourself, your team and your clients to enter the collaborative meeting room with less script and more presence. (Hopefully this helps with the stage fright!)

From Core Principles to Creative Innovations--Building on Past Experiences to Create and Sustain the Collaborative Practice of the Future.
During the past three decades Collaborative Practice has grown from core ideas created by a handful of pioneers to a worldwide movement bursting with the possibility of great innovations. This workshop will focus on taking the very best ideas of the past 30 years and creating a ladder to developing and sustaining an innovative Collaborative practice.  
Ron Ousky and Megan Yates, Collaborative professionals who have been teaming up for over a decade, are working together to develop an innovative Collaborative practice by combining bold vision and practical ideas.
The workshop will start by providing specific examples of what has worked in the past, including ideas on practice and skill development and better business practices. Next, focus will shift to innovative ideas that are taking their Collaborative practice to new levels, from unbundling to upstream marketing to flexible teaming.

This workshop presents effective strategies to enroll potential participants at intake and, once enrolled, to design strategies with your client to enroll your client’s spouse employing tools that have proven effective for leading Collaborative professionals. This workshop is useful to Collaborative professionals of all disciplines and skill levels.

As Collaborative Practitioners we pride ourselves on the depth of our compassion for our clients. However compassion can quickly turn from attunement to trap leading to fractured teams and weakened agreements between clients. We will explore how to recognize and work with the duality of compassion, and her sisters empathy and sympathy providing tools to free yourself, team and clients. This training will include individual and group exercises, demonstrations and role plays.

Completing a challenging collaborative case with many dysfunctional features and troubling surprises requires a variety of creative strategies and reliance on team cohesion. Travel through this difficult case of roadblocks including difficult personalities, refusal to disclose, traumatized teens, boundary violations, gender bias and more, as we share our case saving skills to reach a successful end.

How do I get more Collaborative cases?  It is not just about a marketing strategy, it is about how you engage with your potential clients from the first contact with your office.  Participants will examine their current practices and learn how to approach an initial consultation from the client’s perspective so that clients leave feeling like the Collaborative process will provide them with the best option of navigating their life transition.

Learn about our unique experience expanding CP principles beyond family issues to Conscious Contracts® and then beyond business.  The Asociación de Derecho Colaborativo de Euskadi enlists broad community support, including the Basque Government and uses CP as a tool for public innovation. Our impact was assessed by a neutral researcher.  

Necessary conversations underlie our Collaborative work.  The labeling of these communications as “difficult” conversations has resulted in professionals choosing to avoid them at the peril of our clients and our professional relationships.  In this workshop we are going to develop the skills that are required to have these necessary conversations result in positive outcomes.

Explore how the Collaborative Practice can be an effective method in reducing the impact of separation and divorce on family run businesses. This process seeks to ensure that the business remains viable for both spouses, as well as future generations.

Social media is all about engaging with your prospective client and turning followers into influencers. If you want to bump up your practice to the next level, then learn how to connect, engage and influence using interactive social media and be sure to bring your laptop!

There is a direct correlation between a strong and inclusive Collaborative Community and having a personally satisfying and profitable Collaborative Practice.   Join us as we explore from a multicultural perspective how Collaborative Communities are being created, sustained and energized around the world.

This workshop will be a working session for IACP members to develop strategies for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in their local and regional practice groups.  Members of IACP's Equity and Inclusion Committee will lead the discussion, and also ask attendees to describe efforts that their practice groups are already making.

Think your client is going to make a bad financial decision? What can/should you do about it, if anything? How can the team help? In this interactive workshop, you will gain a deeper understanding of your biases and learn strategies for working with clients and the other professionals.

In our current climate of polarization, we forget that intense discord accompanied the Framers to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1787.  The key to this monumental achievement was found in the time-tested tools of conflict resolution employed by today’s skilled mediators. These myriad skills, and their context, will be explored in this workshop.

This workshop will present a model in which collaborative lawyers work with estate lawyers to design and implement plans to protect children’s inheritance upon the remarriage.  This model is being utilized in the Hudson Valley by the presenters along with others, and is a natural extension of collaborative work with existing and new clients.

Using video, discussion, and exercises we’ll create consciousness raising experiences to facilitate profound shifts in perception. On that foundation, we’ll practice strengthening mind-sets and skills, enhancing cultural fluency in response to diverse experiences and attitudes, while facilitating resolutions that take Collaborative Practice more efficiently and frequently beyond agreement to healing.

Parents can have parenting conflicts both before and after divorce. Incorporating action-oriented processes shifts the focus of what can be done to help things go right rather than simply a focus on preventing problems. Exploring and resolving co-parenting ambivalence through Motivational Interviewing techniques encourages ownership, enhances self-efficacy, and assumes competency.