When Clients Retain Their Power: The Collaborative Law Process

By Michael P. Sampson

ABA Just Resolutions, April 19, 2024

Updated June 17, 2025

The Collaborative Law Process values client control and self-determination. Clients can express themselves and participate in the Collaborative process in ways and at levels other processes not primarily focused on them do not encourage. 

By choosing a dispute process like the Collaborative Process, which gives them a voice and power to shape resolving their dispute and their destiny, clients are more likely to feel satisfied with their chosen process than they would feel with other processes. They perceive processes that emphasize and invite self-determination – a cornerstone principle of the Collaborative Process – result in satisfying, acceptable outcomes.

The ABA-Approved UCLA Promotes Settlement through Self-Determination

On February 5, 2024, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates adopted Resolution 703, approving the Uniform Collaborative Law Rules (UCLR) and Uniform Collaborative Law Act (UCLA) as “appropriate for those states desiring to adopt the specific substantive law suggested therein.” ¹

State Adoption of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act Marches On!

As of this writing, 28 jurisdictions have enacted the UCLA, 21 by statute, 5 by rule, and 2 (Florida and Alabama) as a hybrid approach.² On April 4, 2024, Kentucky became the 23rd state; on May 21, 2024, Louisiana became the 24th state; and, on July 26, 2024, Mississippi became the 25th State plus the District of Columbia to adopt the UCLA by statute or rule. In 2025, Connecticut and Oklahoma adopted the UCLA by statute.³

Here is a statewide chart of enactment.

The UCLA Encourages Clients to Take Control of Their Future

The UCLA promotes client self-determination. Procedural justice researchers have found more client control of the process they use to resolve disputes is more likely to leave them satisfied with the outcome. In the Collaborative Process, that means having a voice, expressing themselves, and actively participating in the process.⁴

The Uniform Law Commission (ULC), which drafted and approved the UCLA in 2010, cited this procedural justice research.⁵ In mediation, clients who could participate and shape the outcome in their process were more satisfied with the process than they would be with adversarial processes, where they lacked this voice and participation. Likewise, the ULC found such self-determination central to the Collaborative law process.

Self-Determination: Who Knows Best?

Who knows better than the client what’s best for their families, businesses, and themselves? Their lawyer? A judge? Client-centered dispute resolution processes, like Collaborative practice and mediation, value and encourage clients, rather than paternalistic advisors or tribunals, to control decisions that will profoundly affect their families, businesses, and themselves.

Clients Goals Drive Outcomes in Processes that Respect Retained Client Power

Robert A. Baruch Bush⁶ observed:

“Parties value the self-determination inherent in consensual dispute resolution, as they believe they know what is best for themselves and want to be able to incorporate that understanding into the settlement of their disputes.

Robert A. Baruch Bush, Efficiency and Protection, or Empowerment and Recognition?: The Mediator’s Role and Ethical Standards in Mediation⁷

The Collaborative Process puts clients first. Client control of decisions is a cornerstone, and, to mix metaphors, may be at the heart, of client-centered approaches to lawyering.⁸ Clients must choose among alternative paths and options. Each path or option has legal and nonlegal consequences. Yet which alternative or option will best satisfy a client derives from the client’s unique values, goals, and intuition…elusive even to lawyers who aspire to read minds. 

In client-centered dispute resolution, clients decide on paths and options they select.⁹ From initial consultations to the first full collaborative team meeting to signing agreements resolving issues, the Collaborative Process encourages clients to identify and articulate their values, goals, and feelings, with a “big picture,” longer view, so they may arrive at agreements most acceptable to them.

The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals Respects Client Self-Determination

Client control is not lost on the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals (IACP), the largest global body of Collaborative Professionals. IACP Minimum Ethical Standard 3.2 for Collaborative Professionals, provides that a Collaborative Professional “will respect each client’s self-determination; recognizing that ultimately the clients are responsible for making the decisions that resolve their issues.”¹⁰

Clients’ retaining say-so in their own future leads to satisfaction with the process, even if not the outcome itself. Having a voice¹¹ and and participating in the process leads to a greater likelihood clients will be satisfied with the process and will perceive the process has been fair.¹²

Retained Client Control Includes Using Collaborative Contract Power

Collaborators working in a confidential, intimate, and encouraging environment may achieve — by contract — “person-oriented” remedies. Such remedies may include like “an apology, a handshake, and invitation.”¹³ Clients may express choices by contract commitments that advance their goals. These goals may include maintaining personal relationships (for example, as coparents), preserving bonds in an interdependent group (for example, a family, a neighborhood, or a social group), or moving past the dispute in harmony, without their relationships irreparably destroyed (for example, to continue in business together). 

Even a well-meaning judge – but a stranger to the parties – seldom can impose remedies beyond those equity and law provide for the claims that the parties have presented to the judge for adjudication.¹⁴ Statutes, case precedent, and rules of procedure and evidence constrain judges from ordering actions or awarding relief they believe to be “fair.” 

Collaborative Process: Clients Retain Power to Expand Choices and Create Contract Solutions

Retaining control over solutions expands what people can agree to do.

Consider in the family context obligations parties took on contractually that a judge could not have ordered otherwise. Examples have included:

• Setting forth milestones over three years for a parent to receive increased timesharing with a child.¹⁵
• Paying for an adult disabled child’s support.¹⁶
• Paying post-emancipation support for a child.¹⁷
• Paying for a child’s uninsured future medical expenses until graduation from college.¹⁸
• Maintaining medical insurance and paying for medical, dental, or orthodontic expenses not covered by insurance for as long as a child is eligible, even if past majority.¹⁹
• Paying for a child’s graduate school expenses.²⁰
• Providing for support for a child after the parent dies.²¹
• Paying nonmodifiable durational alimony even after the recipient remarries.²²
• Overriding law terminating alimony upon obligor’s death and expressly making the obligation continue to be enforceable against the obligor’s estate.²³
• Agreeing to use a different date than the law provides for identifying the marital asset cutoff date.²⁴
• Providing for an additional child to be included in a parenting plan without having to show a substantial change in circumstances.²⁵
• Providing for a custody change based on an expected date-certain completion of a servicemember’s tour of duty.²⁶
• Providing for revisiting custody when a precipitating event occurs (a child’s starting school) without having to show a more burdensome substantial change in circumstances ordinarily required for modifying a parenting plan.²⁷
• Waiving rights to appeal.²⁸
• Waiving rights to equitable distribution and agreeing to place all funds to which a parent was otherwise entitled – including half the net proceeds from the future sale of the marital residence – in trust for the benefit of a minor child.²⁹

Client Retained Control: The Collaborative Law Process

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Michael P. Sampson is a Florida Collaborative attorney. He accepts collaborative matters only. Michael is a member of the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section – Collaborative Law Subcommittee, International Academy of Collaborative Professionals (IACP),  Global Collaborative Law Council, Florida Academy of Collaborative Professionals (FACP), and the Collaborative Family Law Group of Central Florida.

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©2024. Published in Just Resolutions, April 19, 2024 – Collaborative Law Committee, by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association or the copyright holder. 

Last updated: June 17, 2025.

1. Available at: https://sampsoncollaborativelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024.02.05-ABA-House-of-Delegates-Adopt-Resolution-approving-Uniform-Collaborative-Law-Act-UCLA-703.pdf
2. Id. at p 6.
3. Connecticut Senate Bill 1283, available at: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2025/FC/PDF/2025SB-01283-R000758-FC.PDF and Oklahoma HB 2117, available at: https://www.oklegislature.gov/cf_pdf/2025-26%20ENGR/hB/HB2117%20ENGR.PDF.
4. Chris Guthrie and James Levin, A “Party Satisfaction” Perspective on a Comprehensive Mediation Statute, 13 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 885, 890-91 nn. 12-18 (1998), available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217048005.pdf. See also Robert A. Baruch Bush and Dan Berstein, Orienting Toward Party Choice: A Simple Self-Determination Tool for Mediators, 2023 J. Disp. Resol. (2023), available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/jdr/vol2023/iss1/5; Robert A. Baruch Bush, What Do We Need a Mediator for?: Mediation’s “Value-Added” for Negotiators, 12 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 1, 21 (1996) available at https://kb.osu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7881714e-5073-51a9-8d35-e12863ab22aa/content.
5. See National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Prefatory Notes and Comments, Uniform Collaborative Law Rules Act and Uniform Collaborative Law Act (Last revised or amended in 2010), at p. 3, available here .
6. Harry H. Rains Distinguished Professor of Alternative Dispute Resolution Law, Maurice A. Dean School of Law and co-author with Joseph P. Folger of The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict (Rev’d Edition 2004).
7. 41 Fla. Law. Rev. 253, 267-68 (1989), available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol41/iss2/2.
8. David A. Binder and Susan C. Price, Legal Interviewing and Counseling: A Client-Centered Approach (1977); Katherine Kruse, Fortress in the Sand: The Plural Values of Client-centered Representation (2006), 12 Clinical Law Review 369, Scholarly Works. 32, available at: https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/32 (Discussing benefits of a client-centered approach); Martha Emily Simmons, Increasing Innovation in Legal Process: The Contribution of Collaborative Law (2015). Ph.D. Dissertations. 11 at p. 41, available at: https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/phd/11.
9. Katherine Kruse, supra n. 9. 
10. IACP Minimum Ethical Standards for Collaborative Practitioners, INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF COLLABORATIVE PROFESSIONALS (IACP) (rev. 2008, restated 2017), Standard 3.2 (Advocacy in the Collaborative Process) at p. 11, available at: https://www.collaborativepractice.com/sites/default/files/IACP%2012.2023%20Standards%20and%20Ethics.pdf (last visited April 16, 2025). See also Pauline H. Tesler, Informed Choice and Emergent Systems At The Growth Edge of Collaborative Practice, Family Court Review, Vol. 49 No. 2, April 2011 239–248 n. 4 available here
11. Tom Tyler, Procedural Justice, in David B. Wexler and Bruce J. Winick (eds.) Law in a Therapeutic Key: Developments in Therapeutic Jurisprudence (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1996) at pp. 3-15; Simmons, supra n. 4 at 67 n. 157.
12. Robert Folger, Distributive and Procedural Justice: Combined Impact of ‘Voice’ and Improvement on Experienced Inequity (1977), 35 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108; E. Allan Lind, Tom R. Tyler and Yuen J. Huo, Procedural Context and Conflict: Variations in the Antecedents of Procedural Justice Judgments (1994), 73 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 767; Simmons, supra n. 4 at 67 n. 159.
13. Melvin Aron Eisenberg, Private Ordering Through Negotiation: Dispute-Settlement and Rulemaking, 89 Harv. L. Rev. 637, 658 (1976).
14. Id.
15. Perseo v. Donofrio, 379 So. 3d 1183 (Fla. 4th DCA 2024).
16. Schmachtenberg v. Schmachtenberg, 34 So. 3d 28 (Fla. 3d DCA 2010).
17. Crow v. Crow, 622 So. 2d 1226 (Miss. 1993); Wilson v. Stewart, 171 So. 3d 522 (Miss. Ct. App. 2014); Boleware v. Boleware, 450 So. 2d 92 (Miss.1984); Mottley v. Mottley, 729 So. 2d 1289 (Miss.1999).
18. Schueneman v. Schueneman, 591 N. E. 2d 603 (Ind. Ct. App. 1992).
19. Green v. Robertson, Record No. 0380-17-4 (Va. Ct. App. Mar. 20, 2018).
20. Pursley v. Pursley, 144 S.W. 3d 820 n. 21 (Ky. 2004).
21. Fessman Estate, 386 Pa. 447, 126 A. 2d 676 (1956).
22. Dills v. Perez, 330 So. 3d 989 (Fla. 5th DCA 2021).
23. O’Malley v. Pan Am. Bank of Orlando, N.A., 384 So. 2d 1258 (Fla. 1980); Matter of Estate of Gustafson, 287 N. W. 2d 700 (N.D. 1980).
24. Suess v. Suess, 289 So. 3d 525, 531 (Fla. 2d DCA 2019).
25. Idelson v. Carmer, 330 So. 3d 81 (Fla. 2d DCA 2021).
26. Stevens v. Stevens, 929 So. 2d 721 (Fla. 5th DCA 2006).
27. Wade v. Hirschman, 903 So. 2d 928, 932 n. 9 (Fla. 2005); Mooney v. Mooney, 729 So. 2d 1015 (Fla. 1st DCA 1999); Arrabal v. Hage, 19 So. 3d 1137 (Fla. 3d DCA 2009); Perseo v. Donofrio, 379 So. 3d 1183 (Fla. 4th DCA 2024).
28. Burke v. Burke, 52 Va. App. 183, 662 S. E. 2d 622 (Va. Ct. App. 2008).
29. Clark v. Clark, Case No. 3D24-0046 (Fla. 3d DCA Jan 15, 2025).