Adopting the right negotiating style for your situation

There are family lawyers and family law teams who promote themselves as always adopting a particular negotiating style: for example very consensual or very hard-edged. This might appeal when you are deciding who to instruct, particularly in the often emotionally raw early days of separation.

However, in our experience of advising all types of clients across a wide range of situations, it is important that your specialist family lawyer is capable of adopting different negotiating styles during the course of your divorce. This is because the tone and material facts of a divorce negotiation can change over the course of time.

There are situations where divorce proceedings and related financial matters can be dealt with in a non-confrontational manner for those clients wishing to adopt such an approach.

We also recognise that an amicable split is not always possible or appropriate in the circumstances. So our specialist solicitors are also very experienced in adopting a more determined approach if that is what is required to secure your interests and to ensure you have someone who can ‘fight your corner’.

We are able to draw on different negotiating styles to best advance our client’s interests. It may be that an initially consensual negotiation needs to harden in tone if it is clear that your former spouse is not, in reality, being as constructive as they claim.

Equally, a negotiation that might have started out with a need to resist unreasonable claims or expectations in a firm manner may well benefit from a more conciliatory approach in the latter stages to secure a timely and practical conclusion.

The key point is to choose a specialist family law team whose members can marshal different negotiating styles on your behalf and so secure the right outcome for you and for what you hold dear.