Effective Mediation Strategies for Divorce and Child Custody Cases (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Wendy Hernandez, attorney and creator of Command the Courtroom. This is video four in my series on how to resolve your divorce or child custody case outside of court. So in the first three videos, we have covered the simple strategy of writing letters back and forth. We have covered informal settlement conferences, we have covered collaborative divorce. So in this video, I'm going to talk with you about mediation. So mediation is a process whereby the parties meet and if they have attorneys, the attorneys are often present and there's a key player that's involved that different differentiates mediation from just having an informal settlement conference. So in mediation, there's a neutral person who's trained in mediation and that person works with the parties to try to help them resolve their differences. In most of the mediations that I participate in, the mediators do the mediations in a caucus format. So what that means is that each party has a room to him or herself and if the attorney is with him or her, then you know, the attorney and the party sit in a room and the other party sits in another room and the mediator shuffles back and forth between rooms trying to broker agreements or areas of compromise between the parties. I've had a lot of great success with mediation. I've actually been a mediator in many cases. And I think what's helpful about mediation is that you have somebody who is usually inexperienced, somebody who's experienced in family law, often they're a family law attorney who's been practicing for a while. Often they are a retired judge, the mediators, and they can talk to you about your positions and whether those positions are reasonable. They can help you in reality checking, meaning if you're not really being realistic about what your expectations are, they can help you roll it back a little bit and know what to expect in the courtroom and help you arrive at decisions on your own terms versus having a judge make those decisions for you. If there's one tip that I have for somebody who's considering doing mediation, I would say that it's really important for you to have all of your discovery, your pretrial discovery done prior to going into mediation. And what that means is you should have disclosed everything to the other party that they need to make informed decisions about resolving the case. And you need to feel comfortable that the other party has given you all the information that you need to make informed decisions about the case. If you have not exchanged this information, then you're not making decisions knowingly. And if you're not making them knowingly, you're not making them voluntarily. So if you're making decisions based on incomplete information, you may sign the final paperwork and then six months from now, find out that the house was worth $500,000 instead of $300,000 and you got shorted $100,000 from your share of the equity. That could be really upsetting. So you have to have all of your discovery done prior to mediation. Another tip that I have is if possible, you should provide your mediator with a summary of your positions on each of the disputed issues. That way going into the mediation, you can not waste a lot of time filling in the mediator about what you want and why. If you have it all down in writing, then the mediator can take a look at it, know your positions and you guys can dive right in and start negotiating. So look for the next video in which I am going to talk about arbitration. Remember, give this video a thumbs up if you liked it. Don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you have questions or comments that this video got you thinking about, leave me a comment and I'll do my best to answer. And until next week, remember, keep on trucking and command the courtroom.