Family Mediation Week

As a lawyer, you might assume that my natural habitat is the court room. In fact, as a family lawyer, the court is only one of the places where I ply my trade.

Going to court has traditionally been the way that couples resolve disputes during a divorce or the breakdown of a relationship. However, family lawyers have increasingly come to accept that court can often be the worst option. It can be expensive, slow and can destroy a couple’s ability to work together in the future.

I am a great believer in non-court dispute resolution, whether that be mediation, collaborative process, arbitration or plain old-fashioned constructive negotiation. Court should be the last resort.

This week is Family Mediation Week, devoted to raising awareness of mediation as a means of resolving disputes in family cases. Mediation can be a much better way of resolving disputes following the breakdown of a relationship than court proceedings and it has a number of advantages:

• It is considerably cheaper, perhaps a tenth of the cost of contested court proceedings. If your means are low enough, you may also qualify for mediation legal aid to cover your share of the mediator’s fees, even though legal aid is now rarely available in family cases to meet a lawyers’ fees.

• It can be much faster than court proceedings. The courts are increasingly clogged with cases and more and more courts are closing in order to save money.

• You can keep control over the outcome, rather than placing it in the hands of the court.

• You can come up with more imaginative solutions than the limited range of things that a court has the power to order.

• You can spend time on the issues that are important to you, but which may not be important to the court. For example, if you ask a court to decide how you divide the contents of a house, you’ll get short shrift. It simply does not have the time to do this. In mediation, you can spend time sorting it out.

• You can maintain or even enhance your ability to communicate with your ex. There are not many people who can go through contested court proceedings and still be able to talk afterwards. If you have children, you are going to have to deal with your ex for many years to come, even once they are adults.

The mediator’s job is to facilitate an agreement between the parties. The mediator does not give legal advice and people going through mediation should seek this from a solicitor. Mediators do not decide what is to happen; they are not judges or arbitrators. The responsibility for deciding what is to happen rests with the parties.

If a proposed agreement is reached, both sides should seek legal advice on it and if the agreement is then confirmed, the solicitor will handle the paperwork necessary to finalise the deal.

Mediation s not the only non-court dispute resolution method, There is also collaborative process, arbitration and constructive negotiation. Mediation is not suitable in very case. There will always be some people who can only resolve their disputes by using the court. There are also cases where mediation may be inappropriate, such as where that has been domestic violence, substance abuse or mental health problems.

Mediation can be an excellent, affordable and cost effective way to resolve family disputes. In particular, disputes about how much time a child spends with each parents or uncomplicated financial disputes are usually suitable for mediation.

To find out more about whether mediation is suitable in your case, click here.

24 January 2017

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