In addition to practicing collaborative divorce law, I also train lawyers and other in the collaborative law model. At a recent introductory training for collaborative law, a participant asked whether collaborative divorce attorneys should refer clients to litigation attorneys to advise them as to what might happen if their case was litigated. I found the question very interesting. Subsumed in the question was the assumption or belief that litigators were best positioned to predict likely outcomes in court.
I often say that clients should not seek advice on collaborative law from lawyers who have not received training in collaborative law. The reason is because the collaborative law model is so different from conventional legal representation, that the collaborative law model is not well understood without training. However, all collaborative law attorneys have been trained in conventional representation, including litigation. In fact, collaborative law attorneys must be able to advise their clients about the law, drawing on the same resources and analysis as conventional attorneys. Collaborative divorce attorneys need to be as up-to-date and skilled at the law as any other attorneys. The difference is in the process and the way the information is used.
Yet, the questioner had an interesting point. There is an old saying that "a good lawyer knows the law, but a great lawyer knows the judge." In divorce and family law in particular, broad equitable principles are applied to decide cases. Since those principles are imprecise at best, and the application can vary depending on the local judge, there is definite value to familiarity with local judicial views. In counties with one or two judges, that can be done.
However, in large counties, having that degree of knowledge about specific ways judges might make a decision on an equitable matter is very difficult or impossible, since there can be too many judges and too few data points. In King County, where I practice, there are over 50 Superior Court judges, and it is extremely difficult to get that degree of knowledge -- there are simply too many data points (Judges) and too few contacts per data point for most lawyers to assemble a cohesive perspective of the many different judges.
Interestingly to non-lawyers is the fact that most divorce lawyers do not have frequent trials. Most litigators whom I know have maybe one to three trials per year. The contacts that most lawyers have with the court is on temporary motions, with different judicial officers applying different laws based on different standards and different considerations. It is problematic to extrapolate from Commissioners' calendars for temporary orders to final orders from Judges following trial.
The litigating divorce attorney will look at a case from the perspective of evidence and persuading a judge, which is a different perspective from that applied by a Collaborative Divorce lawyer. While I believe that Collaborative Divorce lawyers can and should be able to provide good advice as to the law, it remains an interesting question to me more because of the different perspective, rather than any possible substantive difference.