Navigating Stormy Parenting Plans: Process Over Chaos

As lawyers it’s easy to get myopic and wrapped up in the chaos, mechanics and technicalities of dispute resolution. Divorce basically deals with money matters and the parenting plan. For financials, we simply collect income and assets, liabilities and debts. Then we shove the numbers into a magical 3rd party software program and we get what we get. For the Parenting Plan? Not so much. This is more art than science. Maybe the parenting plan terminates after high school graduation. But how the parents handle the residential schedule, decision making, and dispute resolution process will have a significant impact on the entire family for decades to come. Because of this, we want our client focused on “process and controllables”. As ‘ol Ben Franklin said, “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.” Same strategy applies today when dealing with parenting plan conflict. Our job is to help uncover the opposing party’s interest and pivot negotiations from positional arguments to focusing on the underlying reasons. Also, our job is to prepare clients to anticipate and better cope with their ex-spouse’s bad behavior. No client can control the ex-spouse, but every client can and should control their own response. This course will inform new lawyers and remind seasoned lawyers how to view the parenting plan from the client’s perspective. Our representation of the client might last 18 months. But for the client the parenting plan is an infinite, life-long game after our job is done. We want to both counsel the client and provide a framework to assist them in their day-to-day interaction (over the coming decades) with the ex. This include interest-based negotiations, impasse and options outside of a fully-agreed to parenting plan, common cognitive bias traps in divorce, and providing a toolbox for thriving…or at least maintaining self control during toxic parenting plan negotiations. Lastly, we negotiate in our professional and personal lives every day. Importantly, while this course is focused on managing “process and controllables” in the parenting plan, the concepts and strategies are fairly universal for general dispute resolution.