As a family-law attorney for over 35 years, I can tell you that the secret to a successful divorce is to minimize your involvement with the legal system and to avoid using lawyers who work in it. Where one spouse is a controller abuser — 5 to 10 percent of all cases — this advice does not apply, but for everyone else, going to an attorney as your first step is the worst thing you can possibly do and court is the worst possible place to settle divorce disagreements.

Here’s why.

To get a divorce, you need to tell the court how you will divide marital property and whether there will be spousal support. If you have minor children, you must also tell the court how they will be supported and parented after the divorce — the visitation schedule. That’s all a divorce is about.

If you can be sure your spouse will not come to court to oppose you on any of these matters, all that’s left is some paperwork to get your judgment (decree in some states). This can be done inexpensively in California or Texas by using Nolo’s “How to Do Your Own Divorce” kit. In other states, you can get it done for a few hundred dollars by using a divorce typing service or by shopping your easy case around to various attorneys until someone gives you a fair price.

If your spouse is in the picture and cares about the terms, then you need to work out a written agreement on property, parenting and support. There is software to make this easy for you. Once you have an agreement, finishing your case is now just a matter of paperwork and can be done for a few hundred dollars as described above.

Inability to agree is almost never about the law, almost always about personalities and emotional upset. If you can’t agree, you don’t need a lawyer; you need a mediator or a collaborative law attorney. If you still can’t agree, you don’t need a lawyer, you need an arbitrator.

There are absolutely no solutions for personal problems in a lawyer’s office or in a courtroom. In fact, the legal system is almost certain to make things worse. This is because our adversarial legal system is based on argument and conflict, where one side argues, fights, and struggles to win, to beat the other side. This is a terrible way to settle family disputes. It increases conflict and expense, greatly increases the time it will take you to rebalance your life, and reduces chances for cooperative parenting.

Before you retain an attorney to represent you, remember this simple equation: “The more trouble you have = the more money your attorney makes.” This is not a good basis for a smooth, successful negotiation.

Many attorneys become so frustrated with the legal system that they leave litigation behind in favor of more constructive forms of practice, such as mediation and collaborative law. These are both discussed below.

Better alternatives

Self-help. The things you can do to help yourself are far superior to anything an attorney can do for you. Specific steps you should take depend on your situation and are discussed in detail in my book, Make Any Divorce Better. If you follow my advice, things will get better soon.

Get organized. Before you can get advice, work out an agreement, or decide what you want and what is fair, you need to organize the facts and documents in your case. You will need to do this sooner or later no matter what, so why not do it yourself for free instead of paying a professional hundreds of dollars an hour to help you do it? Inexpensive worksheets are available to help you make this task easy. Doing this work won’t take long and it will help you understand your case, clarify your thinking, and make clear what questions you want to ask of an attorney, if you decide to see one.

Get advice. After you’re organized, if you have questions about the law in your state you should seek advice from an attorney who mostly does family law mediation, very little or no litigation. This way, you are more likely to get neutral, useful advice that will lead to solutions rather than court. Be sure to ask if the laws of your state are such that you can predict what any judge will order based on the facts and issues in your case. In most states, the outcome of any case is highly unpredictable, which is one of the reasons that a settlement by the parties is far superior to taking a chance on what some judge might decide, a stranger who does not have more than a few minutes to try to understand your family and the facts of your case.

Get help. If you and your spouse can’t work out a written settlement agreement on your own, you have two good alternatives.

Mediation. If both sides agree, you sit down with a mediator who will help you work out an agreement. Mediators are trained to help balance bargaining power, keep communications on point and useful, prevent bullying or abuse in the negotiation, and help the parties find common ground and eventual agreement. Mediation is usually very effective.

Many attorneys claim to mediate, but you should look for a family law specialist who is primarily a mediator, someone who does very little or no litigation. There are also some excellent non-attorney mediators but in general these are best used when the issues of your case are limited to personal discord and parenting. If your case involves money, property or support issues, you’d be better off with an attorney mediator who can bring knowledge of state law and local judges into the discussion. Ask if they do that, because many mediators will not bring in legal information even if they could, preferring each party to have separate counsel, something that greatly increases your cost.

Collaborative law. A collaborative law attorney represents you and speaks for you, but they enter into a written agreement with the other side not to go to court to solve problems. Instead, they concentrate on negotiation and mediation. Depending on your case, they might form a team with an accountant, therapist, child specialist, or financial planner. This approach only works if the party and attorney on the other side are willing to enter into this arrangement. Collaborative divorce has a good track record and even with all the professional services it will still cost less than a court battle. This is a new but rapidly growing subspecialty, so there may not be any collaborative lawyers near you. Go on the Internet and search “collaborative law” plus the name of your state or city, or call the local bar or other attorneys and ask if they know of any collaborative divorce lawyers near you. When you talk to one, find out how many other such cases they have conducted.

© 2008 Ed Sherman

Author

Ed Sherman is a senior partner in Sherman, Naraghi, Woodcock & Pipersky and a family law attorney since 1967. He founded Nolo Press in 1971 with How to Do Your Own Divorce in California and forever changed the way legal services are delivered through his many books on divorce, creation of the independent paralegal movement, and co-founding of Divorce Helpline. He has made it his life’s work to help people keep their family problems out of the legal grinder — our adversarial court system.

Mass Collaboration on the internet â?? beyond the web 2.0 and into the semantic web era.

The Power of Us â?? Mass collaboration on the internet is shaking up business. This article was found in BusinessWeek of June 20th 2005. This article touches on the use of Skype as collaboration toolbox and a cost saver.

The article also covers various examples from various industries, and how collaboration on the internet changed the way they do business.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938601.htm

Pierre Omidyar on “Connecting People”, eBay’s founder talks about the power of community and his efforts to apply lessons learned from the online giant to other spheres

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938900.htm

Open-source software, blogs, file sharing networks, free Internet telephony — they’re each disrupting multibillion-dollar industries and reshaping the landscape of business, politics, and culture. What’s the common thread behind them all? Us.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/06/powerofus/index_01.htm

Sharing is the Net’s Next Big Disruption. New technologies are marshaling the talents, resources, and dollars of millions of people worldwide.

That collective power is shaking up the status quo in many industries

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/06/sharing/index_01.htm

Yale law professor Yochai Benkler points to Google and Skype as examples of a new, Info Age market structure, based on peer production. It is the aspect of sharing economy on the internet.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938902.htm

The Internet isn’t just about e-mail or the Web anymore. Increasingly, people online are taking the power of the Internet back into their own hands. They’re posting opinions on online journals -â?? Web logs, or blogs. They’re organizing political rallies on MoveOn.org. They’re trading songs on shady file-sharing networks. They’re volunteering articles for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and they’re collaborating with other programmers around the world.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938901.htm

How mass collaboration changes everything can be understood by reading Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams book called Wikinomics . Here it is explained how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. For anyone who wants to understand the major forces revolutionizing business today should consider some of these thoughts brought forward in this book.

Tapscott and Williams believes that: â??To innovate and succeed the new mass collaboration must become part of every leaders playbook and lexicon. Learning how to engage and co-create with a shifting set of self-organised partners is becoming an essential skill, as important as budgeting, R&D and planning.â?

http://www.wikinomics.com/

However, I will end this article with a statement made by Googleâ??s CEO Eric Schmidt and he was asked to define the term Web 3.0 just recently..He actually provided some interesting elements to think about.

â??Well, the Web 2.0 is a marketing term, and I think youâ??ve just invented Web 3.0?

The web 3.0 application development projects will focus on a different way to build applications and applications are pieced together. In addition the applications are relatively small. The applications can run on any device (multi-platform) and finally the applications are distributed virally (through social networks, email)

The exact term, like web 3.0 is of less importance. What is important is that we keep track of what is happening in the broader online world, because these evolutions are fundamental drivers of what is and will be possible with respect to open innovation and crowdsourcing. Multi-platform Mass Collaboration and Mashups will be key elements.

Howard Rheingold, author of Street Mobs and invited lecturer at California’s renowned TED conference explains the phenomena of collaboration and its evolutionary effect on creating new forms of wealth and perhaps reforms to traditional economic theory. He initially notes that traditional success in both business and politics was fueled by the notion of Darwin’s biological theory of evolution; that the strongest and fiercest survive. But while this ideology has held true throughout the life of capitalism – he’s sure to emphasize that capitalism will continue to rule – the birth and growth of technology has vastly spread cooperation, collective action, and complex interdependencies. This, he notes, has forced competition to make a little room.

What Howard is really trying to get across to us is that through the cooperation, collective action, and interdependencies new forms of wealth can and are being created. In an example he gives early in his lecture he compares this collaboration to prehistoric times when small family units survived by hunting small game like rabbits and other animals. At some point however, hunters gathered together and collaborated to hunt the massive mastodon. His point being that today we can collaborate to conquer bigger “game.”

While the ideas presented could be criticized as rudimentary, it’s no farce that this level of collaboration is occurring today and is being led by some of the world’s biggest corporations. IBM, Sun Microsystems, and other leading IT firms are open-sourcing much of their software and encouraging other developers, be it graduate students or high school kids, to work and advance the available research. Toyota gives extensive training to its suppliers to help them increase their production efficiency even though many suppliers also work with their direct competitors. Even within these fierce markets, companies are opening up and welcoming collaboration. Why? Rheingold argues this is happening because it is a certain kind of sharing in self-interest.

For example, by allowing bloggers to earn money through its Adsense program, Google enriched itself by creating a new market for advertisers. Amazon.com opened its application interface to over 60,000 designers which in turn has grown the number of Amazon stores significantly while making money for virtual store owners. EBay, the auction giant, created an enormous market by creating a feedback mechanism that allows users to trust each other. All these examples reinforce how collaboration can turn a Prisoners Dilemma into an Insurance Game.

The Prisoners Dilemma, as in all game theory, states that “the only concern of each individual player is maximizing his/her own payoff, without any concern for the other player’s payoff. The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution–that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect even though each player’s individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperate.” The distrust players have for each other in this model is what dictates their rationale. If both could trust each other, they would be apt to work together and obtain larger rewards. This model in which trust is present between actors is known as the insurance game. This is what is beginning to happen. The most evident example of this is EBay. By establishing trust between buyers and sellers a huge new market was established where lower prices are often found for buyers and many new markets for goods that normally can’t be sold are now a click away for sellers.

These actions are all about self-interest to grow and add more to the already existent. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher explained that we need a new way of thinking to understand absolute truth. While absolute truth would be nice, we can start by understanding the sociological and economic evolution that is the future of commerce and innovation. Globalization is shaking the foundation of traditional thought. To finish, I will leave you with the question Rheingold poses in his book Street Mobs. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests? The answer seems to be getting clearer.

Trackback: http://grantdeken.blogspot.com/2008/04/coming-wold-of-collaboration-follow-up.html

Internet is a medium of collaboration. There are millions of web pages, so one can easily get lost in the crowd. But there is a system by which you can get noticed that is by collaborating.

Link to succeed is the formula for promotion.

This section covers strategies which will manifold your presence and ultimately your sales by creating an alliance with other players.

1. LINK TO CHAIN AND CHAIN TO GAIN

Link to others and make a big chain. Another way to gain top website ranking and popularity is to have a “resources” page on your website or most as it is commonly called “Links” page.

Make a Visit to other websites that offer similar content and make a request to their webmaster to Exchange Links. Now either will have each other’s web link mentioned in their respective LINKS section

This also boosts your website Search Engine popularity and ranking. It will also show your website visitors you care enough about them to provide other sources of online information for them and many will view your efforts a courtesy, further making YOUR website more valuable in content.

2. AFFILIATES TO SELL YOUR PRODUCTS

This is an effective marketing strategy.

Affiliates are people who will offer, promote and sell your software on their websites for you in return for a small commission for every sale. It is like having a big team of salespersons…

They put your logo-link or banner on their site and when there is a sale through their site, they get a percentage as commission.

Here it’s a win-win situation for both as the value of their site increases as they are putting a banner or a logo of an established product and to you, your product is getting more coverage.

Many of the more experienced affiliates have websites designed to sell your product or with other similar ones upon their sites. Most of the more experienced affiliates even have and use numerous websites in order to maximize their commission payout. The more sites they have with your product link on it the more presence you get.

There is a wide range of affiliates and how they work at promoting your product. All major players including include an affiliate program with the service they provide and already have an army of affiliates waiting to sell your product. If you want to increase your sales manifold over what you alone can do by yourself – consider having affiliates sell your product.

The logic is the more presence you have, the more you will be the sale of your product

3. PARTNER WITH OTHER DEVELOPERS

Search around and find products that are similar to yours that would compliment each other and make a request to the other developer for a strategic alliance.

A relationship in which you can sell each others product in conjunction with each other – you will be creating “bundle software” packages at a slight discounted price. As done by all Anti-virus firms bundling their softwares with firewall developers and offering Internet Security Suits.

The pricing agreement has to be worked out. You sell your product for $ 25. And the other sells their product for $ 25. Both developers offer the same bundle on their websites for the same price. With a software bundle, the user can be offered for say $ 40. A discount of $ 10 for the user, while each of you has given just $ 5 discount. But at the end of the day both developers benefit from the sale. The customer and the developers both gain. As a result your software gets more exposure for more promotion.

This report helps address to lack of coverage by examining the key trends in the Asia Pacific Enterprise SaaS market and follows up in 2006. A key focus area of the report is in providing an array of market data including market size and growth forecasts for key application segments of the enterprise SaaS market in Asia Pacific excluding Japan. A survey of 385 CIOs and IT decision-makers at small and medium enterprises in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, and Singapore assesses the level of awareness and adoption of SaaS in the region. This report also profiles leading SaaS vendors in the region, their offerings and business strategies.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3

TAXONOMY 6

What is Software as a Service (SaaS)? 6

Who is a SaaS Provider? 7

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 8

Secondary Research 8

Supply-side Primary Research 8

Demand-side Primary Research 8

OVERVIEW OF THE ASIA PACIFIC SAAS MARKET 10

SaaS Vs Traditional Enterprise Software Applications Market 10

SaaS Application Dynamics 12

Vertical Market Dynamics 14

Country Adoption Trends 15

Key Adoption Drivers 15

Barriers to Adoption 16

SAAS: PRIMARY SURVEY RESULTS 17

SaaS Awareness 17

SaaS Adoption 18

Adoption Drivers and Inhibitors 20

Satisfaction level with SaaS Applications 22

Data Residency 23

Future Adoption Plans 23

KEY SAAS DYNAMICS BY APPLICATION 25

On-Demand CRM 25

ON-DEMAND CRM ADOPTION BY VERTICAL INDUSTRY 25

ON-DEMAND CRM ADOPTION BY COUNTRY 26

ON-DEMAND CRM COMPETITION 26

Web Collaboration 27

WEB COLLABORATION ADOPTION BY COUNTRY 27

ON-DEMAND COLLABORATION TOOLS ADOPTION

BY VERTICAL INDUSTRY 27

ON-DEMAND COLLABORATION TOOLS COMPETITION 28

ERP and SCM Applications 28

Other SaaS Applications 29

COUNTRY PROFILES 31

Australia 31

China / Hong Kong 32

India 35

Singapore 37

TYPES OF SAAS CHANNELS IN ASIA PACIFIC 41

SAAS & ASIA PACIFIC ISVS 43

THE ASIA PACIFIC COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE 45

Salesforce.com 46

WebEx 46

RightNow Technologies 47

Oracle 47

NetSuite 47

SPRINGBOARD RECOMMENDATIONS 49

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