Neighbor Disputes and Mediation
Mediation is often thought of as a thing you use for cases that are bad enough to go to court, particularly now that so many cases are ordered to mediation by judges, but in truth the methods used now started outside of court cases. There are some real advantages to using mediation for matters that aren’t quite bad enough for court, and one of the classics is neighbor disputes over things like fence lines and trees.
The legal method of determining a boundary is called a quiet title suit, and they’re loooooong. The reason is that setting a boundary line involves a lot of parties: at a minimum, the people who live on either side of the line, and the county, and the city, and their respective tax boards. If there are mortgages, and there usually are, it also involves the lenders. The courts are understandably cautious in moving real property lines, and the process of notification is lengthy, even before you start to argue over where the line should be. Once you get to that point, it’s often a duel between at least two surveying companies.
The frustrating thing about this is that commonly, disputes over a fence are not about a physical property line, really, they’re about usage. It does happen that someone is legitimately upset that a neighbor has, eg, built a garage extension over their property line, but often the boundary dispute springs from a simmering dispute over things like leaves raked into the wrong driveway and loud music. In my experience handling quiet title cases, the argument between neighbors almost always started long before anyone noticed a boundary issue, but by the time you’re in court, it’s generally way too late to get at the core issue.
Enter mediation. Mediation agreements can include things like quiet hours that are as specific as neighbors care to make them, and can cover things like who will deal with a branch that fell from a tree on one property onto the other. The other big advantage is that a mediator, by being able to talk to both sides, can get at what secret thing the other party is actually mad about.
I often note that mediation makes the most sense when a person is getting lots of angry demands from another, and doesn’t know why. It’s very hard to figure out what they’re actually mad about in a lawsuit, and it’s a lot faster to get things settled once you do. Rather than spending thousands on a lawsuit that might not get at the core issues, consider spending an afternoon with a professional mediator, and seeing if we can’t get you to the core problem.
