Mediation in Divorce

Mediation is becoming more and more popular, and in fact obligatory, in many types of cases, but the classical use is in divorce. When a married couple no longer wants to stay married, there are many, many issues that need to be settled, and this is where mediation really shines. In California, essentially every divorce, called a dissolution at law, will go through some form of mediation, and here’s why.

First, the court is very, very busy, and divorces are what we call fact-intensive. Imagine how you would go about proving that you paid for more than half of a car purchased during marriage to a disinterested and harried courtroom; it’s hard, and it takes a long time, and there are generally a great number of assets and liabilities of a couple, each of which would need documents and testimony.

Second, the questions to be answered during a divorce are themselves difficult. Who contributed more to a family business, when one party put in more hours and the other put in more money? Who should the kids stay with most of the time? What about a painting that has great financial value to one spouse but huge emotional value to the other?

Mediation is the perfect tool to resolve these issues. Unlike a court, we can take as long as it takes to talk to both parties and find where there are agreements and how the relationship can be resolved, today. It’s not at all uncommon for a contested divorce to take multiple years in California, and by the end of such a case, there will be a lot less to divide. Mediation, though, can get at the root disagreements quickly and with much less expense. We can talk to both parties, not just the one a lawyer could represent, and we can craft agreements that are much more nuanced than the court has time for.

We often get parties who are convinced that their case in particular is just too nasty to mediate. Let us save you some time: the court is going to order you to mediate anyway, and it’s likely that we’ve seen cases that are plenty worse than yours. We hire mediators who’ve worked in the courts, and not just family law. In California even custody cases with related restraining orders and criminal charges are required to go to Family Court Services, a form of mediation, and even very difficult cases benefit from having a party, the mediator, who can talk to both sides and see if some agreements are possible.