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53 U.B.C. L. Rev. 141 (2020-2021)
Full Disclosure: Family Violence and Legal Ethics

handle is hein.journals/ubclr53 and id is 149 raw text is: FULL DISCLOSURE: FAMILY VIOLENCE AND LEGAL ETHICS DEANNE SOWTERt INTRODUCTION Imagine a newly separated couple who have each retained collaboratively trained lawyers. The parties both independently decided to use the collaborative process (CP) to negotiate the terms of their separation. Now imagine the wife told her lawyer the full extent of the violence that her husband inflicted on her throughout their marriage, and that she was terrified about what would happen if she tried to leave him. Giving her lawyer that information would trigger a series of ethical issues for a collaborative lawyer. Per the CP tenet of transparency, she would need to tell her counterpart counsel that her client has accused her spouse offamily t I am grateful for the thoughtful discussions with members of the Toronto collaborative practice community, which have informed my thinking that is reflected in this paper. The idea behind this paper was presented at the Canadian Association of Legal Ethics Conference in Halifax, and I am grateful for the supportive feedback from attendees. This paper also benefited from numerous discussions with Alice Woolley, for which I am grateful. Finally, thank you to Jonnette Watson Hamilton, Jennifer Koshan, Malcolm Mercer, Amy Salyzyn, and anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on previous drafts. 1 CP is described in detail in Part III of this paper. In short, CP is a non-adversarial dispute resolution process whereby both parties sign a participation agreement at the commencement of the process, agreeing to the terms of their negotiation. Those terms include good faith negotiation and full disclosure. The terms also include a disqualification provision in which they agree that both lawyers will be disqualified from acting if either party commences a contested application during the process. The disqualification provision is thought to encourage both parties and both lawyers to stay at the negotiation table. CP lawyers use interest-based negotiation to try to negotiate a resolution that is good for both parties.