A new, kinder, kind of divorce

In an interview in Alberta Venture magazine, Karen Stewart was asked what would be her “advice to anyone about to divorce”.
“Know there are alternatives and seek them out before engaging in anything,” she replied. “If you hire a lawyer, ask four things: What’s it going to cost me? How long is it going to take? What’s my guaranteed outcome? What would you say if I was my spouse sitting here? Whomever you choose, ask a lot of questions.”
Stewart knows all-too-well how important it is to ask those questions. The author of Clean Break: How to Divorce with Dignity and Move on With Your Life learned it all the hard way. She pulls no punches as she describes her $500,000-plus divorce that took more than four years to complete. Along the way she almost lost her business, her children suffered and she appears to have lost all faith in the legal system. (To read her side of the story, which is well-documented in the book, you certainly can’t blame her.)
Based on her experience, Stewart says that Canada’s divorce system feeds on conflict: lawyers’ fees can become outrageous through the process; and children can end up being used as pawns along the way, too.
Stewart is obviously one very astute businesswoman, which becomes clear during a read of Clean Break. A great deal of her divorce difficulties came over the battle with her husband as to who was going to get their business. On top of that, though, Stewart also managed to turn her horrible experience into another business opportunity. The book is, in essence, a descriptive advertisement for “The Fairway Process” that Stewart has developed as an alternate to the legal profession’s confrontational approach to divorce.
“When it comes to divorce, there’s the old way — and there’s the fair way,” she says. “I know, because I learned the hard way.”
Stewart’s company, Fairway Divorce Solutions, doesn’t represent one spouse or the other, it works with the couple to develop a mutually beneficial plan that leaves everyone happy. The goal is to allow couples to have more control over the process, rather than feel they are at the whim of the courts or their lawyers, save lots of money, come up with a solution that is “Fair” (in case you didn’t pick that up from the name) and ultimately provide a great outcome for their children, too.
Clean Break has a lot of great suggestions and guidance for anyone going through a divorce. With a legal system that just doesn’t seem to make sense so often, Stewart provides some great common-sense suggestions that will help couples figure out a positive solution to what can be a very stressful situation. I wish there were some more generalities that would make this a bit less focused on promoting her company, but in the end, I think that Stewart’s book has a lot to offer anyone who’s looking to get divorced.

• Stewart, Karen, Clean Break: How to Divorce with Dignity and Move on With Your Life, John Wiley and Sons, Canada, Mississauga, 2008.