Marvin Cases and Mediation
Marvin claims are a California-specific claim in which a person claims, in essence, to be what we used to call a common-law spouse. Two people who have lived together for a long time and have lived similarly to a married couple, but weren’t legally married, don’t have the ability to get divorced, but California does have a (much more complicated) process to sort out who owns what and whether any support should be paid.
If you got here from Google, you probably already know the basics of what a Marvin claim is, but you may have also discovered that 1. they’re complicated, and that makes them expensive, and 2. not many firms handle them. They’re also often a bit hard to mediate, because they’re civil cases, not family, despite dealing with essentially the same subject matter as family law cases.
Briefly, what Marvin says is that you’re not excluded from making claims just because you were living with someone in a romantic relationship. So, Marvin claims generally include things like trying to enforce promises of support, to separate out a family business, or to parcel out debts from a shared house or similar thing. In litigation, this is especially difficult stuff to prove, since generally the agreements were between two people who never wrote down the specifics of their deals with each other. Think of trying to document, at this point, the shared restaurant expenses from someone you dated but didn’t marry, and having to do that in court, with the other party challenging all the receipts.
So, Marvin claims are a great choice for mediation. Like most civil cases in California, they’re often sent to mediation by the court directly, but the parties can also choose to mediate before being ordered. The advantages are substantial: our mediators always start these cases by getting an agreed-upon timeline of the relationship, which can take a shockingly long time to do in court, and we have the ability to really winnow down on which facts the couple agrees on, and which they dispute.
Take a simple example. Alice and Brenda started dating in 1995, and moved in together in 2000. They’re both on the house title, and Alice makes more than Brenda, but Brenda did more of the work around the house. They never married, and now, in 2023, are breaking up. They both have cars, but one is only in Alice’s name, as she has better credit. Who gets the house? Brenda believes she helped Alice work full time by doing more house work; does Alice owe her any support? In California, as in many states, you will never be legally married unless you have a legal marriage, regardless of how long you’re together, so this problem can’t be resolved with a divorce.
The advantage of mediating here, and mediating early, is that you can skip past the preliminaries and get to the meat of the matter, and moreover, you can resolve the non-financial issues as well. It’s very, very difficult to get a court to care that, say, a painting Brenda inherited from her mother is massively emotionally important to her, whereas it’s worth market value to Alice, and Alice wants that money to cover the mortgage. The court essentially has to break everything down to numbers on a spreadsheet, and ask whether each party proved a right to some percentage of a particular asset.
In mediation, the mediator can talk to both parties and tease out the hidden emotions that can confound litigation. We can discover and act on Brenda’s feelings about the painting, we can consider how much Alice’s job relied on someone else doing more house work, and we can help the parties come to an agreement that both can live with.
One of the best things we can offer here, in my opinion, is an orientation on what a Marvin claim looks like in court. Often, two parties who are worlds apart from settlement will shift their positions when they learn what’s really involved in litigating a case, in time, in stress, and in money. In mediator-speak we talk about the BATNA, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, and at Far River we like to spend some time on the WATNA, the worst alternative. In Marvins, this generally means that the best case for a party is going to court and winning; the worst is going to court and losing. In truth, both are generally pretty bad, and that’s what makes mediation so attractive.
And hey, if you do decide to file, you’re almost certainly going to get ordered to mediation anyway. Consider getting an experienced mediator on board early and see if you can skip some of the stress and expense, and leave yourself more to divide.
