Hi friends, this is Ryan Reed from Reed Law Group. I talked in a separate video about the mediation process for family court cases, what it is and what to expect if you’re taking part in a mediation.
In this video, I’ll answer the question, How should you prepare for successful mediation of your divorce case or your child custody case or your other family court case? I think preparation for these types of mediations involves two things, mainly. One is a bit more about preparing yourself.
The other is about preparing your case. Taking case preparation first, you want to be sure that you’ve worked with your lawyer to cover that you’ve done your homework, both of you, in terms of organizing documents or other information that may become pertinent at the mediation. That could mean updating financial documents like account statements or pay stubs, maybe a recent home or vehicle appraisal.
If spousal support is an issue in your case, it could mean creating a detailed budget for your anticipated living expenses after the divorce. If your case involves children and a timesharing schedule, it can mean knowing the school schedule for breaks or other holidays. It might even mean creating a proposed timesharing schedule that outlines when each parent will have time with the children. But it may not just be about documents of this variety.
Let’s say maybe you want to have access to the expertise of a financial advisor or some input from a child’s therapist during the mediation conference. If you think those things may be useful to you, make sure that you’ve arranged for access to those types of folks during the time that you’ll be in the mediation. So from a case preparation standpoint, depending on your specific case, there could be a few moving parts as you approach mediation. And so therefore it’s a good idea to meet with your lawyer at least a week or two before the mediation conference, to be sure that your case is prepared.
Now, preparing yourself for mediation can, for some people be a much more challenging task. You’re going to be asked to make some very difficult decisions about important things. The things that matter the most to you: the time that you’ll spend with your children, and even the time that you’ll spend away from your children; whether or not you’ll be able to stay in your home or required to relocate; what you can count on for your financial future or your retirement.
These are not easy things for most people to even think about much less to negotiate over. And yet, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing in mediation. So it helps if you can come to the mediation conference with some idea of how you would prefer to see those things resolved.
Now, that does not mean that you’re going to get each and everything that you want in negotiation after all compromise by its nature does require give and take from both sides. But when you’re talking about how to divide up time with children between two parents, or how much money may need to change hands for spousal support, or any of these other again, difficult topics, it really pays to have given some thought to those things before you come to the mediation. Both in terms of what you want, yes, but also in terms of what you can live with if you can’t get what you want.
You really don’t want to be confronting these things for the first time in the middle of the process. So, try to have a game plan for how you’d like to see them work out. With that said, and this may be the most important point, yes, it’s important to have a plan or to have preferred objectives, but you still must be prepared to keep an open mind.
The progress that you make in mediation may look much different from what you’ve envisioned. But being open-minded doesn’t mean changing or abandoning your important principles. It means being flexible enough in your thinking to identify or accept some ways of reaching an objective, for example, that may be different than the way you thought you’d get there. I think it’s productive in exploring compromise to be both open minded but also to be laser focused on solutions.
Here’s what I mean. If you come to mediation and you’re focused on the things that went wrong in your marriage or your co-parenting relationship, or you’re focused on all the things that your spouse or co-parent should have done differently or could have done differently, it will be difficult to devote the emotional energy needed to consider compromising with that person in order to reasonably resolve the dispute.
And remember, that’s the point here. As I said in the prior video, mediation is simply a tool for trying to resolve a dispute. You’re there to try to resolve as much of your case as you fairly and reasonably can. And that goal is most likely to be achieved when the participants are emotionally prepared to be open-minded, but also to be focused on solutions. Finally, some very basic practical advice, not so much legal advice. Make sure you’re well rested when your mediation starts follow as much of your regular daily routine that day as possible.
If you eat on a certain type of schedule or you exercise a certain way every day, try and do those things. Your day will go much better if you’re as grounded as possible to your normal daily experience. So, those are a few thoughts on how to prepare for mediation. It’s certainly the leading method today for resolving divorce and custody cases, most of which are in fact settled without a full-blown court trial. And if you undertake the kind of preparation that I’ve spoken to here, I think you’ll have a good chance that your case will be one of those that gets settled successfully out of court. So best of luck with your mediation, and thanks for listening.
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