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Background Information
I grew up in southern Minnesota, at Fairmont, and graduated from Mankato State College (prior to it becoming a university) with a double major in psychology and sociology. My career began as a juvenile probation officer in Rice County at Faribault before I transferred to St. Paul when I started law school at William Mitchell. After graduation, and passing the Minnesota bar, I left probation and started my own law practice, which I continue to do some 35 years later.
My practice gradually centered around family law, where I soon began to realize how much emotional damage could be done to good people and families who found themselves in family court.
I began to study mediation and add those cases to my practice. Around 1989 I heard about Stu Webb, and how he was talking about a process he called collaborative law. He began assembling a group of family law attorneys and mediators, and we started talking about how we could provide a healthier alternative to parties going through divorce. In 1990 we formed the Collaborative Law Institute, committed to a few basic principles.
We believed that people deserved to have an alternative to getting caught up in the traditional litigation process, and that they should have the right to hire attorneys who would agree to work with them to resolve their differences without going to court. We created a process by which parties could do this, and we, as attorneys, would agree not to use the court until we had a final agreement which could be submitted as a stipulated default, to be approved by the court. The parties agreed further that in the event either of them decided to leave the collaborative process, both of the attorneys would withdraw, and help the parties find trial attorneys to represent them in that process.
This is actually an old idea. In England attorneys are either barristers or solicitors. Barristers would represent people before the courts, and solicitors would draft deeds and agreements for parties outside the court process.
This idea took off, and we now have an international association of professionals practicing this basic model, not only throughout the United States, but also in Canada, Europe, Asia, Japan, Australia and new locations emerging regularly.
© Bruce Peck Law Office
Bruce Peck Law Office
I help good people make tough choices during difficult times.
