Cooperative divorce aired out.

Byline: Kevin Featherly

In its last act Tuesday before a budget agreement could trigger the sprint toward a final bill, the joint House-Senate Public Safety/Judiciary conference committee took on the thorny subject of do-it-yourself divorce.

A cooperative divorce measure from Rep. John Lesch, chair of the House Judiciary committee, first took the form of House File 1115. It allows a couple to get a certificate of marital dissolution through the Bureau of Mediation Services, without involving lawyers or the courts.

The idea is to spare splitting couples the expense of counsel and the agony of adversarial legal dramatics, Lesch has often said.

The measure is opposed by battered women's advocates and by the Minnesota State Bar Association's family law and real property sections. They worry it could put abusive partners in the driver's seat while depriving both spouses of competent counsel and judicial oversight.

But Lesch, himself an attorney, says the current divorce process needlessly pits couples against one another. Were his option available, he said, couples could set rancor aside and calmly work out agreements themselves.

By contrast, lawyers tend to pit divorcing spouses against one another to wrangle the best deal for the client, Lesch said. Such was his personal experience with a rough divorce a decade ago, he has said.

"Around the corner there's another motion saying that you're a bad parent," Lesch told the committee Tuesday. "There's another motion to say that you're a bad spouse in one way or another."

Both sides in almost all divorces case feel aggrieved to some degree, Lesch added. "So it's really easy to bait a person to go down the nasty route," he said. "It's an industry."

The bill sparked an angry debate among Democrats on April 29, when it was heard on the House floor during consideration of the House public safety omnibus budget bill.

Assistant House Majority Leader Jamie Becker-Finn, DFL-Roseville, tried unsuccessfully to strip it out of that bill. Her challenge lost, 63-68, partly because GOP House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, urged Republicans to join the relative handful of DFLers who backed it.

However, in the conference committee's final pre-budget-numbers hearing last week, committee members from both parties remained silent.

'Pretty simple'

Former Rep. Andy Dawkins, DFL-St. Paul, has worked many divorce cases over 30 years as an attorney. He has been trying to get cooperative divorce reform passed since...