December CPWA Family Law Collaborative Training

Help families separate without the court battle. Join us in Perth for Collaborative Practice Foundation Training, two days of interdisciplinary training for family lawyers, mental health professionals and financial professionals. This training qualifies you to take on collaborative matters, meets the CPWA, AACP and IACP training standards, and provides 12 CPD hours. The training will take place on Tuesday 8 and Wednesday 9 December 2026, from 8.30am to 5pm, at the College of Law, Durack Centre, Perth. The cost is $1,000 inc GST.

You already know how this usually goes

You've seen what an adversarial separation does to a family. Letters that harden positions. A property pool that shrinks with every round of correspondence. A child who learns to say nothing at handover.

Most professionals in this field are very good at what they do. The problem is the process. It asks each of you to work alone, and often against each other, on a problem that is legal, financial and emotional all at once.

• If you're a lawyer, you spend hours managing emotions you were never trained to handle, while your client's costs climb.

• If you're a mental health professional, you see the toll on parents and children, but you have no seat at the table where decisions are made.

• If you're a financial professional, your careful work becomes ammunition instead of the shared foundation for a fair outcome.

Separation isn't just a legal event. It's time we worked like it.

There's a better way to work, and WA has been doing it since 2007

In Interdisciplinary Collaborative Practice, each participant has their own collaborative lawyer. A mental health professional or FDRP (the coach) and an accountant or financial advisor (the financial neutral) work with both of them. Everyone, clients and professionals alike, signs a Participation Agreement committing not to go to court.

That one commitment changes the room. The energy that used to go into preparing for battle goes into solving the problem. Clients stay in charge of their own decisions, each professional does what they do best, and the team models the respectful communication the family will need for years to come.

Collaborative practice is used across Australia and around the world. It's supported by the Australian Association of Collaborative Professionals (AACP) and the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals (IACP). Collaborative Professionals WA (CPWA) has trained and supported WA practitioners since 2007.

What you'll walk away with

By the end of Day 2, you'll:

• Understand the spirit and practice of collaborative practice, and where it sits alongside mediation, family dispute resolution and litigation

• Know how the CPWA model runs, from the first client meeting to the team prebrief to the first collaborative meeting

• Understand what lawyers, coaches and financial neutrals each bring, and how to work as an equal member of the team

• Know how to prepare clients for their first collaborative meeting

• Have practised the model yourself, in role plays with colleagues from the other two disciplines

• Have the beginnings of a referral network across all three professions

You already have the skills. These two days show you how to use them as part of a team.

What the two days look like

This is practical training, not two days of slides. From the first session, you'll sit at mixed tables with a lawyer, a mental health professional and a financial professional at each one.

Day 1: The foundations

• What collaborative practice is, and how it grew in WA

• Family dispute resolution in Australia, and where collaboration fits

• The real interests of separating families, beyond the legal

• Bargaining styles, and what each one does to a negotiation

• How each profession sees the others, and what those assumptions cost clients

• The value of neutrals: the coach and the financial neutral

Day 2: Collaboration in action

• Working in teams: communication, emotion and empathy under pressure

• Letting go of control: how each professional's role changes before the first meeting

• Preparing clients for their first collaborative meeting, shown live and then practised in role play

• The team prebrief and the first collaborative meeting, using a realistic case with multiple children, a complex property pool and plenty of hurt

• Where to from here: CPWA membership, practice groups and building your team

• Networking drinks to close the training 

Fair warning: there's role play. Bring your inner thespian.

What completing the training gets you

Complete both days and you can start taking on collaborative matters.

• Membership: meets the training requirement for membership of CPWA and the Australian Association of Collaborative Professionals. 12 months free membership included with your registration. 

• International standard: meets the International Academy of Collaborative Professionals (IACP) minimum training standards

• CPD: 12 CPD hours

• A professional community: CPWA members meet regularly in small practice groups for networking and ongoing learning. This is where collaborative teams form and referrals start.

Who it's for

You don't need any prior collaborative experience.

• Family lawyers who want to offer clients a credible path that stays out of court, and to practise in a way that makes room for your skills as educator, adviser and problem solver, not just advocate.

• Family Disputre Resolution Practioners and Mental health professionals (psychologists, counsellors, social workers and family therapists) who want to help separating families while decisions are being made, not only once the damage is done.

• Financial professionals (accountants, financial planners and advisers) who want to be the trusted, neutral source of financial clarity that both parties can rely on.

Your presenters

You'll learn from three experienced collaborative practitioners, one from each discipline. They're the same kind of team you're training to join.

Julie Strack, Financial Neutral

Julie is an Executive Director at Pitcher Partners and the current President of Collaborative Professionals WA. She's a Chartered Accountant, Certified Practising Accountant and Registered Tax Agent with more than 30 years' experience in public accounting and consulting. Julie specialises in business structuring, taxation, self-managed super funds and litigation support. She regularly works as a Financial Neutral, bringing clarity and transparency to the division of assets.

Debbie Clinch, Collaborative Lawyer

Debbie is an accredited family law specialist and Partner at Clairs Keeley Lawyers, with more than 30 years in family law. She practises across children's matters, child support, spousal maintenance, property settlement and financial agreements. Debbie is a nationally accredited mediator, Family Dispute Resolution Practitioner and qualified Independent Children's Lawyer. She was President of CPWA from 2019 to 2022 and is a Board Member of the Australian Association of Collaborative Professionals.

Tiffany Rochester, Clinical Psychologist and Collaborative Coach

Tiffany is a Clinical Psychologist and Co-Parenting Coach with two decades' experience bridging clinical practice and the family law sector. Her background includes work as an expert witness in the Family Court, in court-mandated family therapy and as a Collaborative Law Coach. As founder of The Same Mountain and Co-Parenting Companion, she's an international speaker and trainer whose evidence-based frameworks, grounded in Contextual Behavioural Science, help high-conflict families build workable co-parenting relationships. Tiffany is Past President of the ANZ Association for Contextual Behavioural Science, a former Research Associate with Telethon Kids Institute and a CPWA Council Member.

Closing invitation

Every collaborative practitioner has a first matter

In 2008, two Perth family lawyers ran WA's first collaboration with their training manuals open on the table. They told their clients it was their first, and asked them to trust the process.

You don't need to be an expert to begin. You already have the skills. These two days show you how to use them as part of a team, and introduce you to the people you'll build that team with.

If you've been looking for a way to help separating families without it costing them so much, we'd love to see you on 8 December.