TERRI BREER, ESQ.

Professional Background

Terri Breer has been practicing law and mediation in Orange County for twenty-one years. She obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California in 1981 and obtained her law degree at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California in 1985. She started her career as a trial attorney, handling primarily real estate, business and family law litigation. She has also worked as an in-house corporate attorney for Lewis Homes, a real estate development company in the Inland Empire and gained valuable experience as a transactional attorney and became familiar with legal issues regarding employee-employer relations, fair housing, and corporate matters.

As a litigator she learned that she preferred to solve her clients’ legal problems through negotiated settlements, rather than through the litigation process. This was particularly true with respect to her family law practice, where she focused on settling family law disputes whenever possible. In many cases she found that divorcing couples were able to make their own decisions with their spouses concerning the parenting of their children, payment of support and the division of their assets, but that they were often simply uninformed, overwhelmed and confused with regard to their rights, and the role of the court in their divorce. She found that when client’s were able to control the outcome of the divorce process rather than face the uncertainty and conflict of litigation, their families suffered less and their finances were preserved. Ms. Breer began to limit her family law practice to those cases where she could act as a mediator between both parties. She returned to Pepperdine University and completed family law mediation training at the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution and began her mediation practice in 1995.

She is a member of Orange County Collaborative Divorce Solutions, a multi-disciplinary group of divorce professionals providing collaborative teams for resolving divorce using the multi-disciplinary collaborative divorce model for dispute resolution. This non-profit group includes financial planners, divorce coaches, child specialists, attorneys and mediators trained in the collaborative method of divorce.

Ms. Breer received Collaborative Divorce Training (CDT) in February 2004. She is a member of the International Association of Collaborative Professionals (IACP) and participated in the IACP Conference in Boston in 2004, Atlanta in 2005 and recently in San Diego in 2006. She is the founder of the South Coast Collaborative Divorce Professionals and hosts luncheon meetings in Irvine, California providing an opportunity for divorce professionals to network, share their services and resources for the benefit of their divorce clients.

Breer Law Collaborative Practice

The collaborative process is a relatively new way in which divorcing couples, together with trained professionals, work as a team to resolve disputes without going to court. A collaborative divorce not only saves families money, but it also reduces the conflict associated with litigated divorces, and provides families resources to assist with co-parenting, financial decision-making, post-divorce budgeting, and emotional support.

Ms. Breer provides services as a collaborative attorney for either spouse in collaborative divorce cases and also offers mediation services acting as a neutral facilitator for both husband and wife. Whenever it is beneficial for her mediation clients, Ms. Breer collaborates with a team of divorce experts, including financial planners, business and real estate appraisers, family and couples therapists, divorce coaches, and co-parenting specialists to assist her clients in making wise decisions for their families as they work towards settling their marital disputes through the mediation process.