Divorce Mediation: A Path to Peaceful Resolution
Resolve your divorce with dignity, cooperation, and a solution tailored to your family.
The Power of Mediation
Moving Beyond Litigation
Through mediation, you and your spouse can divide assets, work out support numbers, and even make child custody plans that work for everyone involved – all while maintaining a less oppositional and more open relationship with your former partner.
In this guide, we’ll go over the process of mediation and how it can resolve your divorce quickly, easily, and without the pain and bitterness that so often comes from litigation. We’ll also show how mediation can lead to a bespoke divorce solution that leaves every party satisfied with the end result.
Redefining Divorce: A New Approach
When most people think about the end of a marriage, they’re picturing the grueling process of divorce litigation. That means spending months in a courtroom across from your soon-to-be former partner, arguing through lawyers about every little detail of the separation. It can be a pretty miserable experience, and many people don’t even know there are alternatives out there.
The truth is, litigation is only one of the options available to divorcing couples. At Forester Family Law, we’re firm believers in the power of mediation, a more holistic method of conflict resolution that trades an adversarial approach for a co-operative one.
We believe that divorce shouldn’t be about winning or losing in court, but rather finding a solution that allows two people to walk away from the end of their relationship with dignity and respect intact.
Every relationship is different so why should divorce be one-size-fits-all?
At Forester Family Law, we’ve made mediation the cornerstone of our practice because we’ve seen firsthand how well it works.
The most significant advantage that mediation offers is the ability to create your own unique solutions customized to your situation.
The Power of Mediation
Moving Beyond Litigation
Unlike litigation, mediation isn’t constrained by the strict rules and codes of family court. This opens the door for more creative solutions designed specifically for your family. Even the process itself is highly flexible and can be customized to make sure that everyone involved is comfortable.
- Want to just sit down with your spouse and work everything out through conversation? Mediation has you covered.
- Prefer to communicate only through the mediator and avoid all contact with your partner? We can do that too. It’s all about making sure everyone feels comfortable and safe with the process.
- Another advantage of mediation is that it focuses on collaboration and strategic decision making instead of pitting you and your spouse against one another.
If you’ve ever gone through divorce litigation, it’s easy to understand why so many people wind up hating their exes – that is a common byproduct of the court process. But mediation encourages you to work together with your spouse, oftentimes preserving your friendship while you move towards a solution that works for both of you.
Embracing Cooperation Over Confrontation
The Strategic Benefits of Mediation
For centuries, our courts have operated with a standard adversarial method. That means one team of lawyers makes their argument, the other side’s lawyers make theirs, and then the judge decides who gets what they want. This goes for criminal cases, civil cases, and even family cases like divorce.
- The problem with that kind of divorce resolution is that it breeds conflict.
- It forces you into seeing your spouse as the enemy since the only way to get what you want is to defeat them in court.
- Plus, let’s be honest, bringing lawyers into a disagreement isn’t exactly going to make things more friendly.
Because attorneys can become a bit numb to the effects that an adversarial process creates in the parties, they can be slow to see how damaging that process can be to the parties, and worse – to their children.
Why Mediation Matters
Mediation avoids that conflict by giving you another way to get what you want:
strategy-informed and empowered decision-making.
The best way to leverage strategic decision-making is to start by finding common ground, which is exactly where the mediation process generally begins. When you don’t have to worry about winning or losing, you might be surprised by how many things you and your former partner can agree on.
Mediation also allows you and your spouse more freedom to work out your priorities. Litigation requires each party to demand specific (and often unrealistic) figures or assets, but what they’re really looking for might be more broad or emotional in nature.
Here’s an example:
Imagine a divorcing couple fighting over ownership of the house they shared.
One source of common ground might be the realization that neither one of them wants the house to be sold – they want their child to inherit it after they’re gone. That common goal can help shape the remaining
discussions around the property issues through a child-centered lens instead of a self-focused one.
Our divorcing couple can agree that they don’t want the house to be sold, but they haven’t agreed on who gets to keep it. One person wants the house because it’s a significant financial asset that she’s poured money into, while the other person wants it because he has an emotional attachment to the home itself.
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The simple solution may be to trade the value of the house for the value of other assets that need to be divided, like retirement or investment assets. But a more creative approach – and an approach that a court would not likely take – might be to have the more financially attached spouse maintain an ownership interest in the home while the emotionally attached spouse retains the right to live in the home until the kids are off to college or some other milestone is achieved at which point the home can be sold and the investment can be liquidated. This is a great example of the kind of strategic thinking that mediation can lead to. Even though only one person gets to live in the house, both parties are getting what they really wanted all along. |
Navigating Parenting Disputes with Compassion
Most scenarios become more complicated and emotionally fraught when children are involved, and divorce is no exception. Parents will fight tooth and nail to protect the well-being of their kids, after all, so disagreements can quickly become sticking points.
So how does a mediator handle parenting disputes?
By starting with the common priority shared by all parents: their children’s welfare. When divorcing parents are able to think cooperatively instead of adversarially, it becomes significantly easier to put their children first. Every issue, from support to property division, can be handled based on how it will affect the kids, and it’s amazing how easily disputes can be resolved when they’re viewed through that lens.
Most scenarios become more complicated and emotionally fraught when children are involved, and divorce is no exception. Parents will fight tooth and nail to protect the well-being of their kids, after all, so disagreements can quickly become sticking points.
Financial Conflicts: A Path to Equitable Settlements
Mediators handle financial conflicts the same way they handle everything else:
using empathy and communication to foster compromise between parties. However, the process of untangling a divorcing couple’s finances can be complex and, quite frankly, a little arcane.
It's important to find the right mediator for complicated financial issues.
At Forester Family Law, our clients benefit from Neil Forester’s years of experience as a litigator handling high-asset financial cases, but not all mediators have the same background and expertise.
When handling especially intricate matters, financial or otherwise, a mediator might choose to bring in an outside expert to help make sense of the details. Sometimes it can be helpful to have a professional to explain the ins and outs of each decision as it’s being made – after all, you shouldn’t have to be a financial expert yourself to get the outcome you deserve.
When dealing with financial issues, the most important thing is to make sure both spouses are being heard and their concerns addressed equitably. It can be all too easy to end up feeling railroaded in court, especially if your partner was the one who handled the money. But the mediation process is designed to make sure everyone involved is heard and can walk away feeling like they got a result that makes sense in their particular circumstances.
Your Family, Your Decisions: The Mediation Advantage
At Forester Family Law, we believe that you should be in the driver’s seat of your own divorce, not a judge or a team of lawyers.
One of the greatest advantages of mediation is its flexibility. Here’s a brief outline of the process, showcasing the freedom you have to craft your own journey:
Step 1
Step one is going to be finding the right mediator. Don’t be afraid to take your time with this one!
It’s important to find someone who has the experience you need for your unique situation.
You should also make sure you end up with a mediator you feel comfortable talking to – in that way, it’s a little bit like finding the right therapist.
Step 2
Step two is figuring out the rules and structure of your mediation process. Although the mediator might have some suggestions, the decisions remain in the hands of you and your spouse.
You can choose to meet remotely or in person, with or without lawyers, or you can avoid face-to-face meetings with your former partner altogether and communicate through the mediator.
Some people feel more comfortable with a more formal mediation environment, while some prefer a more informal and relaxed conversational approach. Either way, the choice is entirely up to you.
Step 3
Step three is the mediation process itself. While the mediator will be running the sessions and facilitating communication, you and your spouse are still in the driver’s seat.
The mediator will take you through every area of conflict and encourage you and your partner to communicate priorities, find common ground, and eventually find the softest landing place under the circumstances.
This process only takes as long as it needs to – it can be as short as a few days, or as long as several weeks.
Step 4
Finally, step four is finalizing your agreements.
The agreement is a document that sums up the decisions you made during the process, to be presented to the court after mediation has ended.
These agreements are indistinguishable from the Marital Settlement Agreements and Judgment forms that are prepared at the conclusion of the litigation process (unless the matter ended with a trial) and are legally binding once they’ve been signed by the judge.
Through every step of the mediation process, you and your spouse retain the power to shape your own futures. We believe that each family is best equipped to make decisions based on their own unique needs, and that shows in our commitment to open and flexible divorce mediation.
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