Mediation for Ugly Cases
Mediation is, some places, a tool for what you might call light cases. Two neighbors disagree about a tree, two parents who can still talk to each other in a calm fashion want some help in parenting time plans. Some mediation groups won’t even touch cases with, for example, a restraining order in the history, or allegations that, if proven, would be criminal. Frankly, and based on a great deal of experience in family law, this excludes those groups and those mediators from the vast majority of cases. Family law gets pretty ugly pretty quickly, and a mediator who wants to help but won’t touch uglier cases should probably find another field.
Similarly, though a lot of parties don’t know it, a lot of business disputes can, if things go wrong, turn into much more serious cases. For example, a contract dispute over who invented what can turn into a fraud claim if one party goes to the police, and of course if a company is publicly traded, what would otherwise be a private dispute between executives can start to look much more like insider trading or securities fraud. Even more serious are the problems that can pop up in probate; in fact my first big multi-felony case started with a couple taking care of grandma during the last year of her life, and having a dispute with family members over how the money had been spent. One of them called the cops, and the next thing that happened was an 80-count indictment for mandatory sentence felonies. It went from a family squabble to a potentially life sentence, without any of the parties involved ever meaning for that to happen.
Broadly speaking, a lot of things in America are illegal, and it’s not always at all obvious what they are. Often both parties to an argument will feel like they are definitely right and will try to get an outside agency involved, not knowing at all that they might end up the one in trouble, or dealing with something much more serious than they expected. A lot of family disputes, too, can turn vicious quite suddenly, and when this happens, a mediator needs some experience and some knowledge to be able to help.
To be clear, if there is an active restraining order preventing one party from talking to the other, there’s very little we can do. It’s not uncommon in family cases to have restraining orders in both directions, in fact. The best that can be done here is to ask the lawyers involved to consider trying to get a court order lifting the ROs for the purpose of, and for the duration of, mediation, which is of course generally done of video chat for these cases. Similarly, of course, a mediator can’t prevent anyone from going to the cops or other agency, and may be a mandatory reporter for some issues. But, a big part of our job and our skillset is preventing bad problems from getting worse, and at times we can do our best work in the uglier situations.
It’s true that mediation is harder in these cases, and it’s true that you rely even more heavily on an experienced mediator, but it can be done and the results can be fantastic. Even if you’re pretty sure you have a dispute that can’t be mediated, you might be surprised at what can be accomplished by someone with some experience, and you might be surprised which cases can turn ugly, and how fast. If you have something you think might turn ugly, or something that already has, think about giving us a call.
