Why Use A 3-Step Divorce Team Mediation and How Does It Work?
By Ria Severance, LMFT
What’s The Most Efficient Way to Mediate Your Divorce, and Who is Best Equipped to Handle It?
Collaborative Divorce Professionals are specifically trained to function skillfully on interdisciplinary teams. All Collaborative Professionals are required to also be trained in Mediation, and to be members of a Collaborative Divorce Practice Group. Virtual Divorce California is such a group (VirtualDivorceCA.com). Collaboratively-trained Financial Specialists, Licensed Mental Health Professionals, and Family Law Attorneys all specialize in divorce and work “collaboratively,” to get you or your clients to the divorce finish line efficiently and cost-effectively, without going to court. Professionals share information, mindful of the long-term well-being of each family member.
What’s A Typical 3-Step Team Mediation with Collaboratively-Trained Professionals?
Step 1: Your Neutral, Collaboratively-Trained Financial Specialist (FS)
A typical 3-Step Team Mediation begins with the divorcing couple meeting with a neutral Financial Specialist (either a CFP® or CPA, with a CDFA®, depending on the specifics of your case). There are at least 4 reasons a neutral Financial Specialist is your best first step in any divorce process:
- Efficiency. Your Financial Specialist (FS) is trained to answer any financial questions, and to gather, organize and analyze all your combined, legally required financial data for your mediating divorce attorney (Step 3).
- Cost-Savings. Usually a neutral FS has a lower hourly fee than a mediating family law attorney. In any divorce process, you are legally required to be transparent about all your assets and debts – the consequences can be harsh if you’re not. When numbers don’t jive for any reason, the financial neutral simply asks for the documents needed to clarify matters, and you can’t move forward without these. In contrast, in litigation you each typically pay your attorney to formally subpoena the information from the other partner’s forensic accountant. Thus, in litigation, you typically pay four professionals instead of just one. Honest litigating attorneys will tell you that while an effective forensic accountant may find some things, if a spouse is good at hiding money, you can pay a fortune to try to find something and come up short. At some point in any divorce process, you will have to decide how much you are willing to spend to try to continue looking for what may or may not be hidden from you.
- Preparation for Making Fully-Informed Financial Decisions, Before You Negotiate . The FS can prepare budgets to ensure you understand the long-term financial impact of different scenarios you’re each hoping might work. You’re prepared in advance , rather than going in blind, to negotiate the sharing of income, assets, and debts with your attorney mediator. Your divorce decisions are therefore far better informed.
- Confidence and Trust increase for both partners as finances are shared transparently and discussed, and also as a less financially savvy spouse is educated by the neutral FS . A more financially savvy spouse is often no longer trusted in the same ways as during the marriage. In this respectful atmosphere, with shared, clear financial data and separate budgets for possible scenarios, each partner is often less anxious and more trusting. Both partners are then significantly better equipped to avoid becoming positional or adversarial when they meet with the neutral attorney mediator to negotiate. Anecdotally, when divorcing couples get in front of a neutral attorney mediator first, they often imagine they need to advocate in positional ways before they even have a clear picture of their shared income, assets and debts. Interacting first with a neutral FS can circumvent the impulse to become positional.
Step 2: Your Neutral, Collaboratively-Trained Licensed Mental Health Professional (MHP)
At the same time you’re getting financial data to your FS, you can hire a collaboratively-trained, licensed Mental Health Professional to move your divorce forward. There are at least three ways to use an MHP for your divorce:
- Effective Communication & Managing Intense Emotions . An MHP ensures you communicate respectfully and manage intense emotions when conflict impairs you or your partner’s ability to provide data and discuss options effectively with the FS and/or later when you negotiate the sharing of assets and debts with your attorney. If you are a couple with at least one high-conflict partner/spouse, you may need two MHPs – one for each partner – to help you get to the divorce finish line; High-conflict divorcing couples often waste much time trying to get a single MHP to align with his/her/their perspective. A Collaborative MHP also trains up your communication skills, and coaches you regarding the nature and tone of proposals, and emails to each other and to the team, as needed.
- Cost Effectiveness . In any divorce process (Do-It-Yourself, litigation, mediation options, or collaborative divorce), your costs increase any time there is increased conflict, adversarial positioning, emotion dysregulation, and/or blame-laden, judgmental communication by you or your professionals. The more conflict there is, the more professional intervention is needed and the higher your divorce costs. In addition to blocking/redirecting conflict and training up skills, an MHP with a divorce specialty also works behind the scenes with the FS and attorney mediator throughout, to ensure understanding for a safe, effective mediation context. For example, the MHP may assess each partner’s concerns and help the FS identify the different kinds of financial data each spouse needs to better understand the other spouse’s perspective and interests. Without a shared understanding (which doesn’t require agreement!), it will be difficult to move forward.
- Detailed Parenting Plan (Custody Agreement) That Anticipates Kids’ Future Needs & Future Co-Parenting Decisions That Avoid Later Conflict. If you have children, the MHP helps you mediate your parenting plan with a clear understanding of child development, the impact of divorce on children at different stages (including adult children who are too often disregarded), and important divorce-related family dynamics. You can mediate your parenting plan while you’re getting your financial information into the FS . The collaboratively-trained divorce MHP also trains up parenting as well as co-parenting skills, for your kids’ sakes, while you mediate your parenting plan. Your mediated parenting plan agreement is later included by your attorney-mediator in the final divorce agreement. Effective, collaboratively-trained MHP mediators also help you anticipate and address (in more detail than an attorney can), the co-parenting/child-rearing issues you would otherwise be more likely to argue about going forward (e.g. time on devices, extracurricular programs, college tuition, etc.).
STEP 3: Your Neutral, Collaboratively-Trained, Family Law Attorney
Finally, a comprehensive understanding of your finances, and effective communication and co-parenting skills equip you and your attorney-mediator to negotiate a more comprehensive and lasting agreement. A collaboratively-trained family law attorney is best equipped to:
1. Mediate how you’ll share your income, assets and debts in legal ways,
2. Understand the law and the constraints of the law in detail, and
3. Draft the final legal documents submitted to the court.
Note: Anyone
can legally call themselves a “divorce mediator” as “mediation” only requires a 30-40 hour course certificate, and is not
a regulated profession or license. Only a family law attorney is specifically trained to read, understand and apply the law to your case, and to draft legal documents.
When an attorney-mediator is collaboratively trained they will have a reservoir of capable professionals , if needed , to help you complete your divorce and stay out of court. The FS can attend some of these meetings to clarify finances, or an MHP may help alleviate tension and move things forward when clients get “stuck” in positions blocking forward movement. Your mediating family law attorney advises you about the law and provides educated guesses about what a Judge would be likely to decide if a given issue were to be resolved in court. Because the mediating attorney is neutral and can’t give you legal advice regarding what is in your individual best interest, attorney mediators routinely want you each to consult with a “mediation-friendly” consulting attorney (understands the downsides, risks and costs of litigation so support your mediation) who provides legal consultation regarding your best interests, as needed during your mediation, and reviews your final agreement before you sign.
Why Divorcing Clients Choose a 3-Step Team Mediation?
- They may not be able to afford the full-team process that a Collaborative Divorce provides, while still wanting the multi-faceted and collaborative professional help. (In litigation, your attorney may require you to have therapists, forensic accountants, etc. but they are not working together mindful of all the different facets of your case.)
- They want the more efficient, cost-effective process offered when divorce professionals with specialized expertise handle the legal, financial, and the relational/co-parenting/custody matters. Hiring an attorney to do all three tasks can be more expensive and less effective.
- One or both partners exhibit the characteristics of high-conflict personalities which are likely to escalate conflict (and far more costs) in an adversarial, court divorce. Such personalities are typically more effectively handled by licensed mental health professionals working on your team, with your collaboratively-trained financial specialist and attorney. A global litmus test for whether litigation can be avoided is whether a spouse can seriously consider a different perspective than their own.
- Rather than wanting a judge to decide their futures, the clients want to make their own decisions about how they will share parenting decisions, and how they will share their income, assets, and debts.
- Clients may need more help to stay out of court than a single, mediating attorney may be able to provide.
- Clients want a confidential process where only the final divorce agreement is filed with the court.
- They want a more respectful, kinder and less adversarial process for divorce than litigation offers, for their sakes as well as their children, as their restructured family moves forward.
- They know that a final divorce agreement in Mediation is every bit as legally enforceable as the final agreement arrived at by litigation. In any divorce, enforceability depends largely on the specificity and clarity of the language used.
- Clients want the flexibility and responsiveness to your family’s unique needs that decision-making in mediation provides. In litigation, attorneys and the judge must make decisions based on existing laws. In litigation, for example, the Court cannot make orders about paying for college or your kids’ religious education. In contrast, in a Mediation, Team Mediation or Collaborative Divorce, clients can make any agreements that best suit their family members’ needs, as long as those agreements are legal.
Ria Severance, LMFT
offers EFT couples therapy, decision counseling, parenting/co-parenting therapy, divorce-related conjoint therapy, and serves as a collaborative divorce coach & child specialist, as well as a parenting plan mediator. For more divorce-related information please see VirtualDivorceCa.com
and attend one of their no-cost Divorce Options® webinars
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Reflection from William Hogg LL.M: I am writing this on the flight back to London, which probably explains the slightly scattered nature of what follows. I have just spent three days in Basel and I am still letting it all sink in. I had been looking forward to this conference for a long time. It did not disappoint. Basel was a wonderful setting, and the programme gave us a lot to think about. There were moments where the quality of discussion really stood out, not because it felt overly polished, but because people were speaking from experience. From 4th to 6th June, I joined professionals from across Europe for a conference on ethical challenges in Collaborative Law and Practice, hosted by Collaborative Law & Practice Switzerland together with the European Network for Collaborative Practice . As a board member of the ENCP, and of the Family Mediators Association here in the UK, this is a community I have been part of and championed for years. Being in Basel with so many of its members in person was a genuine pleasure. Lawyers, mediators, financial advisers and coaches. People who spend their working lives with families at the worst moments those families will ever face. There was something unusual about being in a room like that. Everyone seemed to be there for the same reason, and it was not really a commercial one. They wanted to know how to do this work better. How to cause less damage. How to help people get through separation with a bit more of their dignity intact. That is what I have come away thinking about most. We tend to talk about family law in technical language. Disclosure, negotiation, orders, hearings, outcomes. All of it matters and none of it is going away. But underneath every one of those words is a person who is frightened, grieving, or watching a future they had planned for simply dissolve. Collaborative Practice starts from that fact rather than working around it. It asks us to care about how someone arrives at the answer, not only what the answer is. For anyone who has not come across it, Collaborative Law is a structured way of resolving family matters without going to court. The clients and their advisers agree to work things out around a table. It relies on honesty, good preparation, and a genuine willingness to solve the problem instead of trying to win. That idea is not new. What felt new in Basel was how hard people are now pushing on the detail. How do you build a proper team around a client. How do you spot a power imbalance before it does harm rather than after. How do you let a child's voice into the process without putting a child in the middle of it. How do you adapt when the person across the table is anxious, neurodiverse, or so overwhelmed they can barely take in what is being said. These are not seminar questions. They are the things that actually decide whether a case goes well or badly. The ethics theme ran through all of it, and rightly so. In Collaborative work ethics are not a footnote. They are the foundation. If one person does not feel safe enough to speak honestly, the process has already failed, however civilised it looks from the outside. If the advisers lose sight of who they are really there to serve, the trust that holds everything together starts to go. A room can be perfectly polite and still be deeply unfair. The same point kept coming back in different sessions. Goodwill on its own is not enough. You need skill, you need structure, and you need to keep questioning yourself. You have to be confident enough to give your client proper advice, and disciplined enough not to throw petrol on the conflict while you do it. You have to ask your client to be open, while accepting that openness is only possible if you have built the conditions for it. That is the part I find genuinely exciting. The principles are old. The way the ENCP and its members are developing them across Europe feels very much alive. There is a real appetite to keep improving, to borrow from how other jurisdictions do things, and to keep asking the uncomfortable question of whether the process is actually helping the families who use it. I came away energised and proud to be part of this community. A special mention to some of the standout contributions over the three days. Shireen B. Meistrich from the US, was excellent, as were lawyers Marc Sheridan and Jacinta Gallant , and Alicia Farran of Our FamilyWizard in the UK. Federica Marabini , Michela Tonini and Sofia Tremolada gave a superb group presentation as a Collaborative team from Italy, and Swiss speakers Titus Thoma and Stefanie Santschi rounded things off beautifully. Thank you all. You are a large part of what made the three days so worthwhile. One thing I keep returning to is that Collaborative work refuses the assumption that separation has to be a fight. Plenty of cases do need a courtroom. Some clients need the protection that only a court can give, and I would never pretend otherwise. Collaborative Practice is not for everyone, and anyone who sells it as a cure for everything is overselling it. But for the right people it can change everything. It gives them somewhere to be supported without being backed into a corner. It lets the hard conversations happen with someone in the room to guide them. It nudges everyone to look past the argument in front of them and towards the life the family still has to live. That matters most when there are children. Two people might stop being a couple and still have to spend the next twenty years being parents together. How the legal process is handled can make that future a little easier or a good deal harder. So, I am grateful to the organisers for three genuinely valuable days, and reassured that there is a serious, thoughtful community of people across Europe who care deeply about getting this right. I am not bringing home one tidy lesson. It is more a reminder. Family law can keep evolving. An established process can still feel fresh when people apply it with imagination and a bit of care. And when professionals work together properly, with integrity and real concern for the person in the middle of it, the client is the one who benefits. That is how we try to think about family law at Laurus . The question is never simply what the legal route is. It is what the right route is for this client, this family and this particular moment in their life. Basel was a good reminder of why that question is the one that matters.
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