Bringing a lawyer can be very adversarial too. If you bring one then many districts will bring their lawyer too. Then it gets expensive on both sides and that money can be better spent (I mean, unless it has truly escalated to that point).
This is true, but we have been lucky so far. Our lawyer is a non-confrontational problem solver (all good ones are, regardless of specialty), and the district has not had theirs at the meetings. All of the meetings have gone well. It is the day to day management of DS's disability that is the problem now.
Full disclosure: I am an attorney and I put a lot of value in having good legal counsel, so I may be a bit biased here, but it has definitely worked for us.
