Our Downers Grove Collaborative & Cooperative Divorce legal team wants you to fully understand recent updates to Illinois divorce law. In the following article, we go over changes enacted in 2016 that affect grounds for divorce, visitation rights, and relocation.

Read more from our Downers Grove Collaborative & Cooperative Divorce lawyers on the recent Illinois divorce law changes.

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Our Downers Grove collaborative divorce attorneys are here to help you better navigate the process of court ordered parenting classes. In the following Learn About Law article, we cover what to expect from court ordered parenting classes and how they operate within an overall divorce proceeding.

Read more about court ordered parenting classes from our Downers Grove Collaborative & Cooperative Divorce team.

Our Downers Grove Collaborative & Cooperative Divorce attorneys want to help you know the differences between the two and have written the following guide on the benefits and downsides of each type of divorce.

Collaborative Divorce and Cooperative Divorce have the potential to prevent in-court litigation of the issues that must be resolved in a divorce case, such as asset division, maintenance awards, allocation of parenting time and responsibility, and child support payments.  If successful, this will make your divorce significantly more cost-effective.  It will prevent the stress to everyone in the family that can arise from contentious litigation.  

‍Agreements reached out of court through the Collaborative Divorce or Cooperative Divorce process tend to be more comprehensive than those reached as a result of trial.  These agreements are also less likely to lead to post-divorce litigation between the parties.

Collaborative Divorces place greater incentives on the parties than Cooperative Divorces to settle their case out of court rather than allowing the process to fail and result in litigation. On the other hand, in a Cooperative Divorce, the original attorneys can continue to represent their clients.

‍Both Collaborative Divorce and Cooperative Divorce are highly dependent on the actual good faith of the parties.  Parties that feel that they cannot trust one another to negotiate and reveal information honestly are not good candidates for Collaborative Divorce or Cooperative Divorce.  Couples in which one spouse tends to emotionally dominate the other are also poor candidates for this process, as the adversarial process and the court in a traditional divorce tend to shield the best interests of one spouse from the other's emotional dominance. 

Read the full article from our Downers Grove Collaborative & Cooperative Divorce attorneys about the similarities and differences between these two divorce options.

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