About Us

Executive Committee

The board of the ACP comprises of up to 10 people (all existing members) and is elected by the ACP membership on a yearly basis. They meet several times a year.

IACP – The Umbrella Organisation

The International Academy of Collaborative Professional (The IACP) is a worldwide organisation. It is an international community of legal professionals, mental health professionals and financial professionals working in concert to create client-centred processes for resolving conflict.

The IACP supports Collaborative Practice as a conflict resolution option worldwide by:

• establishing and upholding the essential ethical and practice standards of Collaborative Practice;

• fostering professional excellence by educating and providing resources to Collaborative practitioners;

• leading and integrating the international Collaborative community;

• promoting the growth of Collaborative Practice.

The idea of collaborative practice was first developed by a family lawyer named Stu Webb from Minneapolis (USA) in the early 1990s. As the ideas began to spread over the next few years, a formal association was then put in place by Pauline Tessler in 1997. Today the IACP has over 5,000 members in 24 countries around the world and continues to grow.

Collaborative Practice In Ireland

Collaborative Practice was first introduced to Ireland in 2005 by Patricia Mallon, a Cork-based family lawyer. After recruiting several other like-minded individuals in Cork, the Association of Collaborative Practitioners (ACP) was formed. The ideas soon spread around the country and new members began joining from all over.

The ACP is currently a limited liability company whose members are comprised of Lawyers, Collaborative Facilitators, Mediators and Financial Specialists, whose aim is to promote Collaborative Practice among those disciplines as process for settling disputes collaboratively in a separation/divorce.

To ensure that their clients get the best out of collaborative practice, all members undertake regular training. As part of a worldwide organisation, some of the members of the ACP have received training from leading proponents of the Collaborative model, including Pauline Tessler, one of the founders of the collaborative movement in the USA.

The Aims of ACP

• To promote Collaborative Practice as a mechanism for settling disputes.
• To support practitioners by providing documentation and ethical guidelines for the practice of collaboration.
• To provide training and peer review structures for collaborative Practitioners.