Collaborative Learning in Practice Group Pods

Collaborative Learning Outside of a Formal Collaborative Practice Group

Author: Ross Evans

This is the one in a series of articles being published by the IACP Practice Group Development Committee. They are intended to help Collaborative Practitioners be successful and Practice Groups grow and thrive. The opinions contained in these articles are those of the writers and do not reflect any official position of the organization.

Many new collaboratively trained professionals often wonder how to build, develop and strengthen their skill set after their initial training. Oftentimes they are not yet part of a Collaborative Practice Group or looking to develop apart or in addition to their practice group. We learned from our early development that the best way to assist our own personal skills was through learning and working with other collaboratively trained professionals. In fact, the best way to develop your own skills is to share success and failure with others who understand what is trying to be accomplished.

This brought about the concept of “Pods”. Just like with Dolphins, a Pod is a group of individuals who are creating a society for both learning and socialization. The Pod can be any size and created to help the members with any learning or training that will be helpful for each member. In many regions around the world, Pods are used as both part of the regional Practice Groups as well as stand alone learning groups to help develop collaborative practice. They can be based on region, skill level, commitment level, learning style, practice level or any other attribute that may be similar for the members. You may have 3 or 4 colleagues who all enjoy book clubs and your Pod may use the many available books on Collaborative Practice to strengthen your skills. You may like to talk in a smaller setting and the idea of sharing difficult cases with a larger group may be intimidating.

Creating a pod is as simple as reaching out to a few other practitioners and suggesting an initial get-together to determine if there is enough interest to get together on a regular basis. Some pods meet weekly, some monthly and some just make it a “whenever” we can get together creating an agenda or even just to hold “grand rounds” and discuss the current cases. We learn from our successes, and we also may learn more from our failures and having a small group of practitioners to break down what transpired can lead to great learning opportunities.

With the upsurge in the use of technology, the Pod does not even have to be present in the same space, and the use of Zoom, Teams or similar platforms can help bring people together. If meetings can be arranged in person, I would always suggest that as the preferred manner since spending time face to face is so important in our work and our learning.

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Thoughts on the flight home from the Basel conference on Collaborative Practice

By William Hogg LL.M • June 10, 2026

Reflection from William Hogg LL.M: I am writing this on the flight back to London, which probably explains the slightly scattered nature of what follows. I have just spent three days in Basel and I am still letting it all sink in. I had been looking forward to this conference for a long time. It did not disappoint. Basel was a wonderful setting, and the programme gave us a lot to think about. There were moments where the quality of discussion really stood out, not because it felt overly polished, but because people were speaking from experience. From 4th to 6th June, I joined professionals from across Europe for a conference on ethical challenges in Collaborative Law and Practice, hosted by Collaborative Law & Practice Switzerland together with the European Network for Collaborative Practice . As a board member of the ENCP, and of the Family Mediators Association here in the UK, this is a community I have been part of and championed for years. Being in Basel with so many of its members in person was a genuine pleasure. Lawyers, mediators, financial advisers and coaches. People who spend their working lives with families at the worst moments those families will ever face. There was something unusual about being in a room like that. Everyone seemed to be there for the same reason, and it was not really a commercial one. They wanted to know how to do this work better. How to cause less damage. How to help people get through separation with a bit more of their dignity intact. That is what I have come away thinking about most. We tend to talk about family law in technical language. Disclosure, negotiation, orders, hearings, outcomes. All of it matters and none of it is going away. But underneath every one of those words is a person who is frightened, grieving, or watching a future they had planned for simply dissolve. Collaborative Practice starts from that fact rather than working around it. It asks us to care about how someone arrives at the answer, not only what the answer is. For anyone who has not come across it, Collaborative Law is a structured way of resolving family matters without going to court. The clients and their advisers agree to work things out around a table. It relies on honesty, good preparation, and a genuine willingness to solve the problem instead of trying to win. That idea is not new. What felt new in Basel was how hard people are now pushing on the detail. How do you build a proper team around a client. How do you spot a power imbalance before it does harm rather than after. How do you let a child's voice into the process without putting a child in the middle of it. How do you adapt when the person across the table is anxious, neurodiverse, or so overwhelmed they can barely take in what is being said. These are not seminar questions. They are the things that actually decide whether a case goes well or badly. The ethics theme ran through all of it, and rightly so. In Collaborative work ethics are not a footnote. They are the foundation. If one person does not feel safe enough to speak honestly, the process has already failed, however civilised it looks from the outside. If the advisers lose sight of who they are really there to serve, the trust that holds everything together starts to go. A room can be perfectly polite and still be deeply unfair. The same point kept coming back in different sessions. Goodwill on its own is not enough. You need skill, you need structure, and you need to keep questioning yourself. You have to be confident enough to give your client proper advice, and disciplined enough not to throw petrol on the conflict while you do it. You have to ask your client to be open, while accepting that openness is only possible if you have built the conditions for it. That is the part I find genuinely exciting. The principles are old. The way the ENCP and its members are developing them across Europe feels very much alive. There is a real appetite to keep improving, to borrow from how other jurisdictions do things, and to keep asking the uncomfortable question of whether the process is actually helping the families who use it. I came away energised and proud to be part of this community. A special mention to some of the standout contributions over the three days. Shireen B. Meistrich from the US, was excellent, as were lawyers Marc Sheridan and Jacinta Gallant , and Alicia Farran of Our FamilyWizard in the UK. Federica Marabini , Michela Tonini and Sofia Tremolada gave a superb group presentation as a Collaborative team from Italy, and Swiss speakers Titus Thoma and Stefanie Santschi rounded things off beautifully. Thank you all. You are a large part of what made the three days so worthwhile. One thing I keep returning to is that Collaborative work refuses the assumption that separation has to be a fight. Plenty of cases do need a courtroom. Some clients need the protection that only a court can give, and I would never pretend otherwise. Collaborative Practice is not for everyone, and anyone who sells it as a cure for everything is overselling it. But for the right people it can change everything. It gives them somewhere to be supported without being backed into a corner. It lets the hard conversations happen with someone in the room to guide them. It nudges everyone to look past the argument in front of them and towards the life the family still has to live. That matters most when there are children. Two people might stop being a couple and still have to spend the next twenty years being parents together. How the legal process is handled can make that future a little easier or a good deal harder. So, I am grateful to the organisers for three genuinely valuable days, and reassured that there is a serious, thoughtful community of people across Europe who care deeply about getting this right. I am not bringing home one tidy lesson. It is more a reminder. Family law can keep evolving. An established process can still feel fresh when people apply it with imagination and a bit of care. And when professionals work together properly, with integrity and real concern for the person in the middle of it, the client is the one who benefits. That is how we try to think about family law at Laurus . The question is never simply what the legal route is. It is what the right route is for this client, this family and this particular moment in their life. Basel was a good reminder of why that question is the one that matters.