Her detective catches him in a compromising position. His attorney slaps her with a restraining order preventing her from using their credit cards. Most of their assets disappear in fees to lawyers, detectives and therapists for the children, who have been thrown into turmoil by the bitterness of the feuding between the parents.

Divorce is an ugly process.

Janet Brumley has a suggestion for taking some of the sting out of the battle that divorce often becomes: Consider collaborative law.

Brumley, a Dallas family law attorney, is the author of Divorce Without Disaster (Professional Solutions Group, $19.95), a new book that explains collaborative law divorce, a method that changes the divorce process from adversarial to joint effort.

"In litigation, we're making both of you as miserable as possible," says Brumley. In a collaborative process, "all the decisions are made together.

"We try to save everything -- we try to save time, we try to save money, we try to save privacy. The success of the process is both people getting what they want."

The Texas family code was changed in 2001 to include collaborative divorce as an alternative to traditional litigation. Brumley says she has participated in about 50 collaborative law procedures since that time, all but one successful.

Divorce Without Disaster explains by example, describing what happens to a fictional couple divorcing with a collaborative law process and then with traditional litigation. In the back of the book is a list of Texas family lawyers who have been trained in collaborative law.

Brumley says she finds that her colleagues prefer the new process once they have experience with it, even though the attorneys wield less power.