Introducing the Turelli Method for Handling Difficult Post-decree Cases
| Publication year | 2015 |
| Pages | 15 |
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Introducing the Turelli Method for Handling Difficult Post-Decree Cases
By John Deschner, Joe Pickard
You don't usually hear comments like these about post-decree family cases, but these were comments made at a 2015 presentation about the Turelli Method at the Jefferson County District Courthouse in Golden. As of March 2015, the Turelli Foundation had completed one year of working with some of the most difficult "frequent flyers"—a term sometimes used for parties that frequently come before the court. In its first year, the Foundation worked with 80 post-decree, pro se family law cases and was "successful" in 68 cases.
The Turelli Foundation was started by retired District Court Judge Richard Turelli and retired family attorney Randy Mustain-Wood. Turelli was a judge for more than 35 years and is now in the fifth year of a predicted four-month "life sentence" due to cancer. Mustain-Wood was a divorce attorney for 30 years and is now in his fifth year after an almost fatal heart condition and surgery. The two teamed up with the goal of creating a specific kind of legacy. They wanted to use their experience to develop a way to attain the goal of "in the best interest of the children" in divorce cases. They began meeting with other interested professionals in 2011 and then started taking cases in the spring of 2014. The resulting system is called the Turelli Method.
The Turelli Method is designed to work with post-decree family law cases that have become complicated and overly time consuming for the bench. These cases often have multiple motions made by both parties, with neither party receiving counsel from an attorney. The parents in the cases have often been divorced for years but have never achieved the co-parenting relationship needed for making child-based decisions. These are thought of as the hardest kind of family law cases, because the pathology between the parties gets hardened and more complicated with time. The parties often feel stuck in a standoff in which legal solutions imposed by the court don't solve anything; instead, they simply start the next round of litigation. It is with these kinds of cases that the Turelli Method achieved an 85% success rate.
Defining Success
"Success" means that some form of agreement was reached, all...
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