Collaborative Law in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada:

Reprinted from an email on the Collaborative Law Group with permission of the author:

We are a small city of 50,000 people.  We have had an active Collaborative
Group here since August 2000.  All but 2 or 3 of the lawyers who do much
family law are members of our group.  We have all had training in the
Collaborative Process (Chip Rose), in Mediation and are getting training in
Interest Based Negotiation Skills, the end of this month. 

We have effectively removed family law from our court system.  There are
only a few files left that appear on our court lists and they are mostly one
lawyer in town who has not joined our group.  That lawyer is losing market
share and is now looking at getting the training and joining our group. 

What we are doing is spreading throughout our province, but most quickly in
the more rural areas.  I and another senior lawyer from our group, David
Carter, have done some training and assisting groups to get started.  We
trained 25 lawyers in our neighboring province, Regina, Saskatchewan (about
200,000 people) they are now asking  to train at least one more group of 24
lawyers. The Collaborative Process is spreading quickly in Saskatchewan as
well.  We are training other groups of lawyers in a number of other smaller
centres in Alberta in the near future

We are finding the Collaborative Process growing most quickly in smaller
centres as we organize critical mass when we start our groups and then have
common training and therefore, common skills and procedures.  We are passing
along our Medicine Hat model, where we share common information and handouts
to clients, common procedures, documents and even a common final contract
that incorporates the terms of each successful collaboration.  We have had
very few failures (only 2 that I know of) and some of us are doing just
about 100% Collaborative files.  We get along better as a bar and everyone's
skill level from senior to junior has increased.  We have collected
statistics for our first 14 months of operation and now government and our
judiciary is very interested in what we are doing. 

Our experience is that the Collaborative Process is ideally suited for
smaller cities and, more rural bar associations.  Collaborative Groups are
emerging all over in our province now and taking what we have done, putting
their own spin on each group and making it better.  Our only request is that
if they improve what we give away, they have to let us know how and what
they changed to make it better. 

Life as Collaborative Lawyers in Medicine Hat has never been better!

* mailto:janis.pritchard@pritchardlerner.ab.ca
* http://www.pritchardlerner.ab.ca