McKINNEY, Texas - When Ken and Abbe Hitchcock decided to end their 18-year marriage, their priority was to spare their three children the nastiness and recriminations that often fly back and forth between a divorcing couple.

"We did not want to get into a standard her-side vs. my-side argument," said Ken Hitchcock, a vice president for an apartment development and construction company near Dallas.

The emotionally wrenching experience associated with divorce has led some couples and their lawyers to adopt a relatively new legal model to make divorce negotiations fairer and more beneficial to couples.

Known as "collaborative family law" or collaborative divorce, it is aimed at making divorce less acrimonious and more cooperative among the parties. Lawyers who practice collaborative law say it is a refreshing alternative for an American legal system that is based on adversaries' battling it out in court.

"It's the sense of control that is so much better in collaborative law," said Janet Brumley, a partner at Verner & Brumley in Dallas. "Instead of lawyers' and judges' being in control, the control still remains very firmly with the husband and wife."

In a collaborative divorce, a couple and their attorneys sign a contract agreeing to dissolve the marriage and settle all issues without litigation and in a non-adversarial manner. If they fail to do so, and if either party wants litigation, both attorneys withdraw from the case, and the parties must then hire new lawyers to represent them.

The aim is to give all parties an incentive to settle.

Collaborative divorce also uses a team approach, bringing in professionals such as certified divorce financial planners and child specialists to help the couple reach as fair a settlement as possible for them and their children.

"The whole idea is if there is a way to achieve a fair settlement for the parties and minimize damage to both the financial estate and the relational estate, that's worth pursuing," said John McShane, a family law lawyer and cofounder of the Collaborative Law Institute of Texas, a Dallas organization that trains lawyers on the legal model.

Texas has been in the vanguard of the collaborative-law movement, becoming the first state - and remaining the only state - to enact a collaborative-law statute, which took effect in September.

Lawyers who practice collaborative law attribute its birth to Stuart Webb, a family law lawyer in Minneapolis, who started practicing collaborative law in 1990.

Webb said he conceived of the model after burning out on the traditional method of handling divorces.

The lawyers' agreement to withdraw from the case if the clients decide to go to court is a key element in a collaborative divorce, he said.

"Everything flows from that," Webb said. "That one rule just shifts the whole game."

Ninety-five percent of collaborative divorces end up settling, said Brumley, the Dallas lawyer who represented Ken Hitchcock.

It can also cost less to go the collaborative route. She said the cost of collaborative-law cases is about one-third the cost of litigated cases.

But not everyone agrees.

"The cost of a collaborative-law case on the average is the same generally as if you had handled it in the traditional method," said Ike Vanden Eykel, a partner at Koons, Fuller, Vanden Eykel & Robertson in Dallas. "The lawyers are still spending the same kind of effort. They're just doing it in a different way and in a more noncombative way."

Collaborative law works best in a case in which a couple is willing to "look at the financial situation squarely and openly," said Maggie Tolbert, a certified financial planner and certified divorce planner in Dallas.

"Where it doesn't work is where one party is hell-bent on extracting justice," she said.

Collaborative law does not work if one party is negotiating in bad faith or if the balance of power is tilted, lawyers say.

"The thing that can be wrong with it is if the parties are on unequal footing in the relationship," said Michael McCurley, senior partner at McCurley, Kinser, McCurley & Nelson in Dallas and past president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Another disadvantage to collaborative law, McCurley said, is that if the parties cannot reach a settlement, they have to start over with new lawyers.