Understanding Your Divorce Options in Washington: Mediation, Collaborative Process, and Litigation

If you’re facing divorce in Washington State, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing which process to use. This choice affects not only your immediate costs and timeline but also your long-term co-parenting relationship and your family’s financial future. Understanding the differences between mediation, collaborative divorce, and litigation can help you make an informed decision that serves your family’s best interests.

The Reality of Divorce Resolution in Washington

A surprising statistic shapes the divorce landscape in Washington: approximately 98% of divorce cases resolve outside of trial. This means that even if you begin your divorce through litigation—the traditional court process—you will most likely end up at a mediation table or in a collaborative setting rather than in front of a judge. Understanding this reality upfront can significantly influence your approach and potentially save you thousands of dollars while preserving important relationships.

Most litigated cases in Washington start in court and proceed through the formal legal process, but they ultimately conclude with some form of negotiated settlement. This pattern exists because judges encourage settlement, court-mandated mediation is common, and most couples eventually recognize that negotiated agreements serve their families better than court-imposed decisions.

Mediation: Negotiating Your Own Resolution

Mediation in Washington offers flexibility in how you approach your divorce. You have the option to participate as a pro se party, meaning without an attorney, though relatively few mediators work with unrepresented parties. More commonly, people attend mediation with their attorneys, who provide guidance throughout the negotiation process.

The mediation process typically involves you and your spouse working through issues while the mediator facilitates communication. The mediator goes between you and your spouse, and you negotiate back and forth until you reach a final resolution on all issues in your case. Many mediations now happen on Zoom, with couples in separate breakout rooms and the mediator moving between them, though you often don’t sit at the same physical table.

The fundamental advantage of mediation is control. Instead of having “the person in the black robes”—the judge—make decisions about your family, finances, and future, you maintain decision-making authority. You can craft creative solutions that work for your specific family situation, solutions that a judge bound by legal guidelines might never consider. This autonomy often results in agreements both parties can live with more comfortably because they participated in creating them.

Collaborative Divorce: A Team Approach to Resolution

The collaborative divorce process in Washington represents what many family law attorneys consider their favorite approach for divorce resolution. This process requires both spouses to agree upfront that they will resolve their divorce entirely outside of court. You sign a participation agreement committing to stay out of the court system and outlining how you will treat each other throughout the process.

What distinguishes collaborative divorce from other approaches is the use of neutral experts. Rather than each spouse hiring their own financial analyst or child development professional, the collaborative process employs shared experts who work for the benefit of the entire family. These might include divorce coaches who help manage the emotional aspects of divorce, child specialists who focus on your children’s needs, and neutral financial experts who analyze your assets and help develop fair distribution plans.

These neutral professionals typically cost less than hiring attorneys to perform the same functions. A divorce coach or financial expert charges lower hourly rates than legal counsel, which means you can access their knowledge without the same financial burden. More importantly, because these experts work for the family rather than for one party, they focus on finding solutions that work for everyone rather than advocating for one person’s position. These professionals help you come to durable agreements on your finances, division of assets, and parenting plans.

The child specialist role deserves particular attention. This professional can actually bring your children’s voices into the divorce process without putting children in the uncomfortable position of choosing between parents. The child specialist talks directly with your children, and then both parents meet with the child specialist to hear what’s going on and what some of the child’s concerns might be. This ensures that parenting decisions reflect your children’s actual needs rather than adult assumptions about what children need.

Collaborative divorce does require that you and your spouse can communicate and participate in joint meetings. These meetings happen either face-to-face or on Zoom, but everyone is together in one Zoom room. Unlike some mediation formats where you stay completely separate, collaborative sessions bring everyone together. This isn’t easy, especially during the emotional turmoil of divorce, but it’s an amazing process. By the time you complete a collaborative divorce, you have developed serious skills in communication with your co-parent—skills that will serve your family for years to come as you navigate birthdays, graduations, holidays, and all the other occasions where you’ll need to work together for your children.

Litigation: When Court Becomes Necessary

Litigation represents the traditional divorce process in Washington. You file a petition for dissolution of marriage, and then proceed through the litigation process and formal discovery. This might include interrogatories (written questions the other party must answer under oath), requests for production of documents, and depositions—all the things litigation-related.

If your case doesn’t settle or if court-mandated mediation falls apart and doesn’t work, you proceed to trial. At trial, the judge—the person in the black robes—makes all the decisions. Washington doesn’t use jury trials for family law matters. A judge hears your case, listens to evidence from both sides, and makes decisions about property division, parenting plans, child support, and spousal maintenance.

Trials are expensive and often very demanding. The preparation required is extensive, and many law firms require fairly large retainers for trial work. A contested trial case can easily reach six-figure legal costs when you account for all the preparation, expert witnesses, and court time involved.

Beyond the financial cost, consider the emotional and relational costs of litigation. Before you embark on a trial thinking you don’t care about mediation and can just go to trial, understand that trials can be very difficult. Think about the impacts of a trial not only on you but on what that trial will do to your lifelong co-parenting relationship.

Every time an attorney stands by somebody who files a document in court that slams the other spouse, those documents are public. Children will access them one day. This is an important consideration, and it’s important that you work with an attorney who helps you think through these implications. The adversarial nature of litigation can permanently damage your co-parenting relationship, making it extremely difficult to work together as parents for years or decades after your divorce is final.

Understanding the True Costs of Each Process

People ask all the time what it costs in Washington to get a divorce. If anyone could answer that question precisely, they could retire to an island somewhere. The reality is complicated because costs vary dramatically based on which process you choose and factors specific to your situation.

Litigation by far is the most expensive because you’re going through the entire process and ending in a trial. Often to get to trial, the firm you hire will require a fairly large retainer for the trial work. A trial case could be a six-figure type cost.

If you start in litigation knowing you’ll likely end up in mediation—as most cases do—this could be more of a typical $15,000 to $20,000 dollar range. However, no one can know for certain what your case will cost until they talk to you and understand the factors involved. There are so many factors in determining which process is right for you and what will make the most sense so that you keep most of your money in your pocket for your family.

Collaborative divorce appears expensive initially because there are all these experts involved, and people think it’s going to be too costly. However, when you look at the direct costs of a collaborative divorce compared to the long-term cost of a divorce you might have patched together outside of the collaborative process, the picture changes. Many people find themselves in post-dissolution litigation after taking what seemed like a cheaper route initially.

When you really look at it, you need to ask yourself: What are the long-term costs to your family of each of these processes? Are you going to be paying for psychological help for your children because you fought as brutally as possible? Or are you going to pay upfront for the collaborative process and now can co-parent successfully with emotional intelligence, putting your children first and center in every decision?

Making the Right Choice for Your Family

If you have any questions about which process to choose in Washington—whether you’re going to go down the litigation route, mediation, or the collaborative process—reaching out for guidance is essential. This is one of the most important conversations you can have as you set the tone of what process you want to start for your divorce and your family.

Choosing your divorce process shapes your entire experience and your family’s future. Consider not just the immediate financial costs but the long-term implications for your co-parenting relationship, your children’s wellbeing, and your family’s financial security.

Ask yourself: How well can we communicate? Do we both want to resolve this outside of court? Are we willing to work with professionals who can help us make better decisions? What kind of relationship do we want to have as co-parents after divorce? Your honest answers to these questions can guide you toward the process that best serves your family.