Is it realistic to expect attorneys to completely separate from their traditional adversarial roles?

In collaborative divorce, “the lawyer is not a partisan, as in traditional negotiation, and is not a neutral, as a mediator is required to be. S/he is something else, a role that is ill-defined and difficult to determine.”1 However, the facts are that all lawyers are trained into an adversarial system and many collaborative lawyers spent years as ardent trial attorneys. Can (or should) clients trust that both attorneys have the ability and self-awareness to overcome the role confusion inherent in the collaborative divorce process?

One might also ask and be concerned about whether the role confusion intrinsic to collaborative divorce may actually leave a client feeling less, rather than more, empowered. Say, for example, a client chose collaborative divorce so as to have an attorney negotiate for him or her. It seems unlikely that that same client will have the ability to speak up should he or she believe that his or her attorney has slipped into an adversarial role.