Welcome to John Susko’s A Better Way to Divorce podcast. John Susko is a Florida family law attorney whose practice is focused on collaborative divorce and mediation. And now, here’s John Susko.
John Susco:
This is John Susko with a person from the Texas community that’s both a board-certified attorney, and also a collaborative divorce attorney. Her name is Camille Milner, and she is going to discuss some of the issues involved with the collaborative process. Welcome, Camille.
Camille Milner:
Thank you, John. It’s nice to be here. I grew up in Denton, and really always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. But first went into personal injury and workers’ compensation because I had had a great grandfather who had died of a workers’ comp injury, and so that was an interest that I had. But before long, when I got back from law school, it became apparent that there was a need for women who took care of families. They have a little bit different perspective and a little bit different touch. And some of the guys here in town that were board-certified lawyers that I was friends with started sending me clients. And frankly, it was the clients that weren’t willing to leave their emotions outside the door.
Camille Milner:
And they got a little worn out dealing with them, and they knew that I had patience with those type folks and was open to helping them. And so, I would plug those clients with one of my local friends of the counselor or psychology groups, and they’d help them to get in good enough shape emotionally that we could do some of the legal work. And then we’d do some more of the counseling, and do some of the legal work. And before long, I had a full-time family law practice.
Camille Milner:
The problem with the family law practice, at that time, back in my day when I was in law school, we didn’t even have mediation. It was something after I graduated from law school because I’m so old. But then, when I was in family practice, what the predominant model was, was litigation, and you went to court.
Camille Milner:
And while I, as a lawyer, enjoyed doing that… because that’s what we were trained to do, we were trained at the University of Texas Law School to be warriors… it was an internal dissonance, because I knew in my heart while I was succeeding in the courtroom, I was damaging and sometimes destroying a family. Not to mention, the incredible cost of litigation.
Camille Milner:
So when collaborative finally came along, and I’ll talk about what I know about the history of that in just a minute, it just was like a kid glove that had been a pattern designed, and cut, and sewn just for me. It was a perfect fit for me that included all the disciplines, and I finally felt like we could keep families out of the courtroom in a better venue to restructure the family than court could ever be.
Camille Milner:
There are a few cases that litigation is still necessary when you’ve got extreme personality disorders, or domestic violence, or addiction. Although to some extent, those are being handled in collaborative process, but there are still some that need to go to court. And so, we still need good litigators. But what we need to do is really enhance our skills and hone our skills so that we’re all able to screen and best serve the clients with what their needs are.
John Susco:
Tell our audience, what is collaborative? I have a difficult time capsulizing it because I just think it’s so common sense that coming up with a great slogan, or a catchphrase or whatever, it’s somewhat difficult for me. But tell me what your definition of a collaborative process is.
Camille Milner:
Everyone pretty much knows what litigation is, or the justice system. That’s going in front of a judge and letting the judge decide how to quote unquote, “divide the baby”. The collaborative process deals with all the aspects of a divorce. So there’s a financial professional at the end of the table who helps the clients. Some of them have never budgeted, and helps them do a post-divorce budget so they know what they’re going to be working with in terms of their monthly income and outgo expenses.
Camille Milner:
And helps them do a complete inventory and appraisement of all that they own, and all that they owe, so that they can evaluate what the values of everything they own is, and come to hopefully an agreement on what the values are so they know really, they can put a pencil down on the paper about what their estate is. And that’s what the financial person does, is help them pinpoint what those two documents should look like. And then through the process, help them develop options that will meet their goals and interests financially. And in other ways besides just financial.
Camille Milner:
Then, as I said earlier, we have a neutral mental health professional. When there is children, that person meets with each party individually, and sometimes together, to develop what will be their co-parenting plan going forward. When will they see the children? How will the children’s expenses be divided up? Where will the children primarily live, go to school? All those typical questions.
Camille Milner:
And the way I think about this is, unlike in litigation where it really is just about cutting the estate in half, or dividing the child and the child’s time in a lot of ways, what we do in the collaborative process is take a blank, white board. And instead of trying to make this family fit into a peg of what… Square peg in a round hole, we develop their parenting plan and their property division around their family. Every single collaborative case is custom-made for that family, based on what their interests are and their goals.
Camille Milner:
And each of the lawyers that are representing a client are best served, and the clients are best served if they have been trained with a number of collaborative trainings, trained in mediation. And they’ve had some experience both shadowing cases and being a lawyer in cases, so that they can show and model for clients how to listen intently, how not to sit there and be planning your response, but listen to here.
Camille Milner:
So there’s a lot of quiet in the room. Sometimes it’s quiet, and lawyers can be very uncomfortable with that, and we have to learn how to let everybody be quiet for a minute if we’re all thinking about things. Lawyers always want to jump in. And so, it is called an alternative dispute resolution process. I like to think at some point we’ll get to where going to court is the alternative dispute resolution process.
Camille Milner:
And in fact, it already is, because I don’t know the exact statistics in Florida, but I think statistically around the country, 80 to 90% of cases settle, whether that’s in mediation, whether it’s in the collaborative process, or whether it’s just by informal settlement conferences. Usually I think only 5% of cases actually go to final hearing in court. So it really is the alternative dispute resolution process, and everything else is more the norm.
Camille Milner:
A lot of times people think that you have to completely trust each other to be able to be successful in a collaborative process, and I don’t subscribe to that philosophy. My philosophy is, if you hire a neutral financial professional that’s going to help you gather all the documents, and look through them, and assimilate them, and help you value… He doesn’t set the values, but he will help the clients determine values.
Camille Milner:
For example, if they have a house or a business, he’ll help them look at the options for valuing those such as with a business appraiser, or a market analysis on a house, or the tax rolls, for example. And so, he shows the clients different options that they can look at on how to value their property or their business, whatever piece of property it is they’re talking about.
Camille Milner:
And one way that, even though it looks on first impression that this might be more expensive than a court case, a case that is handled in litigation, truth be told, when you’re dealing with one neutral professional that you have confidence in, rather than having each side having their own high-cost, high-dollar financial professional, appraiser, or whatever it is in court, you can just imagine the savings in that.
Camille Milner:
And the same thing with the mental health professional. One trained mental health professional can work with the parents, or if they don’t have children just work with the clients on communication skills. And somehow those mental health professionals have so much of an understanding of psychological and emotional bases that people work from, that they’re able to help them come to an agreement on things, whether it’s time with the children, or the children’s expenses. Sometimes it’s adult children and what they’re going to do for holidays.
Camille Milner:
That with these two neutral professionals and trained lawyers in collaborative, we are able to help the families and couples begin the healing process well before the divorce is over. And sometimes, not unusually, they leave, and sometimes I’ve seen them kiss at the door when they go to their separate cars, or go to breakfast together, or leave hand in hand. We help them become more like distant relatives, but still relatives. They share common history. Sometimes they share blood, if they share children. And so, there’s no reason that they should be enemies. It’s just not necessary in most cases.
John Susco:
Let me ask you, what percentage of your cases are litigation cases, versus collaborative cases? I know that some lawyers have sworn off of litigation. Some lawyers don’t, being small practitioners. I understand, I have been a board-certified attorney myself. So tell me what your situation is now.
Camille Milner:
Well, like I’m sure everybody else you’ve talked to, it changes from day to day. In 2007, I was one of those that one of my colleagues in Austin challenged me to just say, “No more litigation.” And I did that, and was rocking along pretty well. And then 2008 came, and with the economy tanking, that changed the landscape of a lot of cases. And it became necessary to go back to taking some litigation, which I have continued to do.
Camille Milner:
It is not my favorite, but there are cases, like we said earlier, that requires litigation. And I also have an office mate that we work together on a lot of cases. He’s an incredible appellate lawyer, board-certified family lawyer, and criminal lawyer. And so, when we’ve got children’s protective service cases with abuse or neglect, or any protective orders with domestic violence, and his background in knowing all the criminal statutes, together we can really cover a lot of the areas that come up.
John Susco:
Tell me a little bit about the experience going forward from the Minnesota folks, the Stu Webb. Tell us a little bit about what you know about that process, and tell me a little bit what you believe collaborative law is, or the process is.
Camille Milner:
Well, Stu Webb is an attorney up in Minneapolis. Brilliant, brilliant man. And also very sensitive in terms of understanding that doing divorces is not just about dividing up the pots and pans, but it’s also a great deal about emotions and relationships. And he was so disgusted at one point, a little over 20 years ago, with the litigation system, and the justice system, and what effect it had on families, that he was about to quit practicing entirely.
Camille Milner:
He wrote a letter to one of his friends who was on the Supreme Court in Minnesota, and said, basically, “You’re going to think I’m touched in the head, but I had this idea.” And the Supreme Court justice came back to him and said, “Not only are you not touched in the head, but you are a visionary. And you have got to follow this, because this is going to change the world.”
Camille Milner:
So he said his first order of business was to find another lawyer in Minneapolis that would be willing to work on these cases with him. And from that became what was originally known as collaborative law. And that at that point was each client had a lawyer, and they did basically the collaborative process that we know today. But out in Arizona and California, where they’re much more open to the mental health professionals, they were developing something similar that they called collaborative divorce.
Camille Milner:
And when these two were talking about merging, there was some debate about what the proper practice protocols were, because the group in California used not only lawyers, but also mental health professionals who served as communications coaches, and financial professionals. And so, there was a lot of discussion about that back and forth. And I was very proud of what those two groups did, because they collaborated, if you want to call it that, and named the international organization the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals. So, the group that is the international group has called it for the last 20 years collaborative practice, which is the umbrella over collaborative divorce and collaborative law.
Camille Milner:
Now, it’s evolved. And in an evolutionary way that Texas played a role, our Texas lawyers went out to California to study what their system was. And they came back from California and said that particular system is heavier with the mental health professionals, each client had their own communications coach, and then there was a child specialist, and then there was the financial professional. And in Texas, it’s not that everybody wears cowboy boots, and cowboy hats, and rides horses, but there is a little bit of that mentality.
Camille Milner:
And what that mentality looks like is, they want to streamline it here. And so, one of our mental health professionals in Dallas, Linda Solomon, worked with one of our leaders in collaborative, Kevin Fuller, and they developed the neutral mental-health professional coach model, which has now become the predominant model around the country. And that is what I understand that Florida uses, too.
Camille Milner:
Some of our trainers from Texas went and trained a lot of the Florida group on that model. So that seems to be the predominant model. And eventually some of our trainers went to Minnesota and trained Stu Webb’s group in the neutral coach model. So, we’re proud to say that Texas has had a pretty substantial part in the evolution of the neutral coach model coming to the forefront of the practice. Not just in the United States, but around the world.
John Susco:
I’ve been involved with the Florida Academy of Collaborative Professionals for the last three or four years. I learned about collaborative in 2016 and became a jumping on the wagon kind of person. But I know that our organization has tried to model your credential situation. Tell me about that. You are a master credentialed collaborative person? What’s the label out there?
Camille Milner:
I’m a master credentialed collaborative professional. I’m not quite sure how many of us there are now. There’s the basic credentialed collaborative professional, and a master credentialed collaborative professional. And to qualify to be a basic… and that’s not the word that we use, it’s just a credentialed collaborative professional… you have to have completed 20 cases in the past three years, I believe. Or eight… No, 20 in your career, or eight in the last three years. It’s been several years since I applied for that, so I’m having a hard time remembering the specific criteria. And then to be a master credentialed collaborative professional, and you have to have successfully completed 50 collaborative cases. And there’s several of us that have been able to reach that milestone.
John Susco:
Let me ask you. In Florida, we have mandatory disclosures that have to be done in any litigated case. And I represent a lot of lower… Not lower, but people that are from the panhandle who aren’t rich.
Camille Milner:
More modest means clients.
John Susco:
More modest means, that’s the word, or the words. And I tell them that this process, we could avoid a lot of that process, and we could agree to not have to disclose. And we knock out the paper generation process. Is that part of what happens in Texas?
Camille Milner:
We have informal disclosure within the collaborative process, if that’s what you’re asking about. When they sign their participation agreement, they agree for full transparency and full disclosure, without the formality of court.
Camille Milner:
I think the way we do it, frankly, is even better than discovery. Because as we all know, if somebody wants to hide cash in the backyard and they’re going to lie about it, you may or may not find that out with a deposition, or written questions, or requests for production of documents. When we do the collaborative process, in the participation agreement, they agree to fully disclose and full transparency, and we put that in the participation agreement. And then we have that inventory that we talked about a few minutes ago that is on a spreadsheet that they both sign a sworn declaration that that is everything to the best of their knowledge.
Camille Milner:
And then we put it in the decree that says, to the best of their knowledge, everything has been disclosed on that inventory, which is not filed with the court. And if there’s anything found to have not been disclosed intentionally, it goes a hundred percent to the other side. Now, once in a while, you have somebody that you think might be thinking about not disclosing everything. But when they look at that penalty, if they are ever found out and they haven’t disclosed, I’ve seen the looks on their faces of, it’s a little bit chilling and they rethink what that earlier thought might’ve been.
Camille Milner:
And if I could go back, John, you asked a question, I gave a really long answer. But basically what the collaborative process offers is privacy, protection of the relationships, preserving the estate because they’re not spending everything they’ve got to fight over maybe two or 3% difference in court. And they have control of the process to the extent that they don’t have their schedules upset, particularly with doctors, and pilots, and people that have pretty tight schedules. They can schedule these meetings around that.
Camille Milner:
And we’re able to look at what are their goals, and what are their interests? And we drill down and find out, are there goals to be able to go to the children’s weddings, and graduations, and family reunions, and sometimes even funerals without having a lot of tension? Are there goals that they don’t want their family and friends to feel like they have to take sides? Are there goals that they want each one of the parties themselves to have financial security and stability?
Camille Milner:
Those are all very lofty goals that are rarely addressed, if ever, in court. But we address those in every single collaborative case. And with the modest means clients, one way that we can pare the expense down on this is, first of all, talk to them about a budget, and how important… One of our financial professionals here says, “People don’t hesitate to go and spend a certain amount, 20,000 or whatever on a car. Do they not think making sure that their children, and themselves, and their spouse are financially taken care of in the future, emotionally and financially taken care of in the future, isn’t it worth looking at it in terms of, “Well, you would spend that much on a car. Would you consider spending X amount, whatever it might be, less than that, or more than that, depending on the case, for the financial and emotional security of your family?””
Camille Milner:
And a lot of people when they put it in that perspective look at it differently. But even for the modest means couples and families, one of the ways that we can pare it down is if we don’t have the joint meetings, when both the neutrals are there, and the lawyers, and the clients. The clients can do a lot of the work offline with the individual neutrals, and they don’t sign anything that’s an agreement, and they just bring it back in concept to the lawyers and we all talk about it together. And sometimes we can finish the whole thing in two or three meetings when we do a lot of the work offline.
John Susco:
In the panhandle right now, the average is three meetings, and we’re finished.
Camille Milner:
That’s great.
John Susco:
Which is very good.
Outro:
This has been part one of a two-part series with Camille Milner, a Texas collaborative divorce attorney. Be sure to join us next time as John continues this conversation.
Outro:
John Susko is a Florida family law attorney. If you’d like to learn more about collaborative divorce or mediation, go to Susko-collab-med.com, or click on the link in the show notes below.