Dallas Collaborative Divorce Attorney, Julie Quaid, was honored with the 2022 Gay G. Cox Award for Excellence in Collaborative Law during the annual membership lunch at the Collaborative Law Conference today. Julie is the immediate past president of Collaborative Divorce Texas. She is a partner in the law firm of Quaid Farish. In addition to her work with CDT, Julie has been actively involved in the State Bar Collaborative Law Section. The Gay G. Cox Award for Excellence in Collaborative Law was established in 2013 to honor and celebrate Gay G. Cox as an outstanding and extraordinary lawyer w ..read more

Collaborative Divorce has long been recognized for the unique ability to allow families to create family specific parenting plans for minor children, addressing interests in a family specific manner that Courts either cannot, or will not.  However, often overlooked, is that Courts also cannot address family interests regarding adult children, while Collaborative Divorce can and often does. This is even more critical as recent Pew Center Research analysis of census data that pre-COVID 47% of young adults (18-29 years of age) or 26.6 million, lived at home with one or more parent. In first ..read more

This is Part 4 of a four-part article.  Please read Part 3, Part 2, and Part 1 as well. Trying to get court settings for hearings in family law cases is a difficult proposition in normal times. Final trial dates are often available no less than 8 months, and up to 18 months, into the future, with the possibility of a continuance.  And that was before the Courts closed to non-essential matters and all trials because of COVID-19. All cases set during the closure are now in need of reset and will have priority over newer cases.  All hearings needed in pending cases but deemed non ..read more

This is Part 3 of a four-part article.  Please read Part 2 and Part 1 as well. Each team in the Collaborative Divorce has a neutral Mental Health Professional to assist with communication during the process and the child parenting plan. While they do not counsel participants, they are trained to recognize if stress is affecting the emotional capacity or ability of the participants to move forward in a positive manner.  This awareness, gives the team direction to address the issues and/or refer the party or parties to appropriate counselors.  If the children are exhibiting signs ..read more

This is Part 2 of a four-part article.  Please read Part 1 as well. The Collaborative Divorce process is completely private. In Collaborative Divorce, court access is not needed for resolution of the type of issues demanded in litigation, such as Temporary Orders Hearings, Temporary Restraining Orders, Injunctions, Discovery Fights/Motions to Compel, Motions to Enforce, Depositions, Subpoenas, and compliance with strict deadlines in Pre-Trial Scheduling Orders, including those related to dueling experts.  In Collaborative Divorce, all temporary matters and production of relevant doc ..read more

The social responsibility of sheltering in place and self-quarantining has changed much of our day to day living. In the legal world, courts initially were closed and then closed, except to emergency situations limited to physical harm to children and spouses/partners.  Finally, through the use of Zoom and other video platforms, court became virtually open, but in most cases only to hear the foregoing emergency cases, truncated contested matters and agreed orders.  Needless to say divorces in the litigation realm have come to an effective standstill.  Critical court dates have b ..read more

Divorce. D-I-V-O-R-C-E. From Tammy Wynette, to movies like The War of the Roses and ads touting divorce as a boxing match or dog fight, our culture has programmed us to anticipate a fight if we are faced with the probability of a divorce. Destroy or be destroyed. The damage to your children, family, friends and just as importantly, to you, is just “collateral damage” from the divorce process.  Divorce is a challenging time in life. Transitioning from being married to being single should not compound that difficulty, but should be a pathway to facilitate positive progression ..read more

The Dallas Law Firm, Quaid Farish, has been named in the 2018 edition of Best Lawyers Magazine under both the Family Law and Collaborative Law categories. Partner attorneys in the firm  Julie Quaid, Charles Quaid, and Christopher Farish are among the most respected family law attorneys in the North Texas area.  For more than three decades, Best Lawyers has been compiled by conducting exhaustive peer review surveys in which tens of thousands of leading lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. The attorneys at Quaid Farish have more than 80 years of combined experience ..read more

10 Tips for Talking to your Spouse About Collaborative Remember to choose the time to talk to your spouse with care Don’t bring up the subject of divorce in front of your children or at the end of  a particularly difficult day for either of you.  Remember that you and your spouse may not be in the same state of readiness for a divorce. He or she may need to move more slowly in order to adjust to the new reality. A collaborative divorce allows the spouses to set their own pace. Remember that your spouse is afraid They are afraid for your children’s future, afraid of the emotional ..read more

When attempts to save a marriage aren’t successful and a divorce is inevitable, you have many options to choose from when deciding how to proceed with the divorce. Consider the goals you have in getting a divorce and evaluate which process will facilitate the achievement of those goals in the most efficient and least painful way. Most people know family or friends who have gone through a divorce in the past and certainly Hollywood has frequently portrayed what a litigated divorce looks like. A vast amount of destruction is a frequent consequence of a litigated divorce and the pain inflicted by ..read more