Is It Time to Regulate Collaborative Practice?

Collaborative practice is a dispute resolution process that is primarily used in family law, and it is currently unregulated in Canada. The forthcoming amendments to the Divorce Act include collaborative practice as a “family dispute resolution process” that a lawyer ought to “encourage” her client to consider, where “appropriate”. This suggests to me that a process that has for the last 30 years has been largely community-based, has finally come into its own – into the federal scope of the Divorce Act and therefore into the collective conscience of all Canadian family lawyers. This begs the question of whether it is time to regulate collaborative practice?