Coparent Academy Podcast
Lifechanging Coparenting
Coparent Academy Podcast
#186 - 3 Key Mistakes to Avoid in Family Law Mediation
Are you preparing for family law mediation? In this video, Ron Gore, family law attorney and mediator, breaks down the three biggest mistakes he sees parents make after conducting more than 100 mediations per year.
Many people enter mediation with the wrong mindset or without the necessary preparation, leading to expensive delays and added stress.
In this video, you will learn:
- The Wrong Focus: Why seeking validation, payback, or total closure is a mistake.
- Misunderstanding the Law: Why you need a reality check on the applicable law and the relative strength of your evidence before you walk in the door.
- Missing Information: The critical financial and scheduling details you must have available to reach meaningful agreements that can be turned into final orders.
Don't let these errors derail your custody or divorce agreement.
If you find this information helpful, please share.
This content is family law education, not legal advice. To obtain legal advice, please contact a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.
Today we're going to talk about three key mistakes that people make in family law mediation. I'm Ron Gore, I'm a family law attorney, I'm a mediator and co-owner of Co-Parent Academy. These are mistakes that I see occur over and over again in my roughly 140 mediations I conduct each year as a mediator, and then also when I participate in a mediation as the attorney for one of the parents or the guardian and lightem, for example. Also, similarly when I've done parenting coordinator work, there's an aspect of essentially mediation in that as well. And I see these mistakes there also. So the first mistake is people come in with the wrong focus. So the only proper focus for your mediation is to get the case settled, to understand that you're not going to leave happy, but you can leave having this case settled, that you can be done with the act of litigation, with the expense of litigation, with the personal damage that litigation can do, even if you're right and even if you ultimately win. So the focus is to get the case settled in a way that is fair and equitable to you, even if you're not totally happy about it, and which provides some custody and visitation terms that keep your children safe and promotes a healthy relationship to the extent it's possible with both parents. That's the right focus, the right intention. The wrong focus is when parents come in seeking validation. They want to be heard, they want to be seen by the mediator. And sometimes they almost treat the mediator as the judge. Any good mediator would tell people, I'm not the judge. You know, it's not even necessarily important if you're technically right or wrong about any particular issue. What matters is are you able to reach agreements that are fair and equitable to the parties and in the children's best interest, even if it's not the ideal scenario, right? If you can live with it. So validation is not what you should be looking for at mediation. You don't need validation from the mediator, you're not going to get it from the other party, you don't need it from your attorney. So don't be thinking validation. It's also wrong to be thinking payback. Sometimes people come in at mediation and they decide that they're going to take really unrealistic positions just to stick it to the other side. Sometimes we have parents who have been difficult or absent, and the other parent is just mad at them. And they're going to put in all sorts of hoops that aren't really required for the child's safety, and which no court would ever order to get that parent back up to a more standard type of visitation schedule, whether it's equal or not. Putting in place unrealistic terms just for the emotional satisfaction of kind of sticking it to the other party is dumb. It's not cost effective. It's going to wind up costing you money. It can get you entrenched into even more increased litigation that's going to be even more expensive. It's going to even put you farther away from any sort of settlement. So payback is always going to boomerang back on the person who's seeking it. It's just vengeance doesn't work. Another improper focus is seeking closure. Your mediation, especially if it's in a custody visitation case, is not going to provide you with closure. In a custody visitation matter, the orders are never final. In child support, the orders are never final until the child is aged out. They can always be modified. So don't have it as an expectation that you're going to have this overarching closure of all the issues. We're going to figure out everything related to all holidays, all extracurriculars, all medical decisions, that we're going to nail everything down. And they think that that's going to save them money to try to nail everything down concretely in a custody order. I hear this a lot on social media that if you don't have every possibility hammered down tight in a parenting plan, then it's your attorney setting you up with failure. But there's a concept of something being too rigid to still be strong. If your custody plan is overly rigid, if it tries to anticipate with an impossible level of detail events regarding your child that are going to occur 10 years from now, when one or both of you may be remarried, right? When there may be some life-changing circumstance that arises that you have no idea about sitting here today, then you're just going to be putting off that litigation to the future. What's better is to have details that are knowable, but also principles. How do you deal with those changes? How do you deal with those circumstances and those decisions that have to be made later? That's what you should be looking for, not complete closure of all possible issues, never to be opened up again. Because that's not going to be what happens. I see people come in with that right focus, but having a misunderstanding of the law or the evidence. A lot of times the mistake that attorneys make in preparing their clients for mediation is they don't educate them about what the law is. So the person, the parent, will come in in a custody case, for example, and have no understanding of what the best interest factors are that the court's going to consider. No understanding of the statute that says in Oklahoma that it is presumed that substantially equal access to the child is going to be in the child's best interest unless it's shown to be detrimental. So there are lots of ways in which a person who, even if they're active in their own case, can have a complete misunderstanding of what the law is, and maybe even a misunderstanding of the strength of their evidence. One benefit of mediation is to help those people receive some education by third-party feedback from the mediator about what the law is and about what the strength of their evidence is. But it's a shame when that's the first time that they've heard about it, because the parent comes into the mediation, and because of this misapprehension, this misunderstanding of what the law and the evidence is, they face this extreme, sometimes cognitive dissonance as they're trying to figure out what a reasonable negotiation position is, because their attorney hasn't ever sat them down and had difficult conversations with them to give them a reality check about what they can expect. So coming in with a misunderstanding of the law or the evidence is the second big mistake that I see people make at mediation. All right, now for the final mistake, and it's missing information. Let's say that you're coming in with the right intention, and that's the settle. You're not coming in seeking validation or payback or even closure. Let's say that you have a proper understanding of the law and what the evidence is. So far, so good. You're avoiding those first two mistakes. But now, if you're going to get the deal done, you have to have the details that matter. And so the third mistake I see people make is they come to mediation with missing information. So if it is a divorce that includes property and debt distribution, not knowing what the marital estate is, not knowing what the property is or what the debt is. If it's an alimony case, the person who is seeking alimony not having an understanding of what their need is and how long that need is going to last, not having an understanding of the ability of the other party to actually pay their requested alimony. If you're dealing with custody and visitation, not having the details of what matters to keep the child safe? You know, what are your work schedules? What's daycare like? You know, what school is the child attending? What school will they attend? What extracurriculars? You know, for holidays, which holidays are important to you and how would you like to configure those? When it comes to issues of child support, you know, what are what's everybody's income? What's the health insurance premium for the child only and not including the other parent? You know, what is the expense of extracurriculars or daycare if it exists? Having those details are really required to be able to resolve as much as possible in mediation. You can come in with the best of intentions, with the best understanding of what the law is, but if you don't have the details that need to go into an order, you're not going to be able to get things resolved. You won't have a good understanding of what a child support figure is. You won't be able to understand whether the other side can actually perform the parenting duties that they're taking on. Does their work schedule permit it? So, in summary, the three major mistakes that I see people make at mediation, having done 140 or so mediations per year. One, having the wrong focus, two, having a misunderstanding of the law or the evidence, and three, having the missing details that they need to actually complete orders. Thank you very much. I hope this information has been helpful for you. If it has been helpful, I ask that you please share this. Let other people know that this information exists for free to them so that they can avoid some of these mediation mistakes as well. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.