Category Archives: Family Law

Deciding to separate is just the first of many difficult decisions facing co-parents. Once it is evident that the relationship is over, questions about the future and the family begin to present themselves, and they present themselves fast and furious. Questions such as -where will the children live? Where will I live? Who if anyone is staying in the home? …
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What does a mediator do? In helping to understand what a mediator is & what a mediator does I have gone to Latin sources. I refer the reader to the Latin word interpres (which came to me on my phone today as my Latin Word of the Day). This word means a middleman, “an agent between two parties, mediator, broker, …
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In light of International Women’s Day being this week, here is an article by Deborah Kolb reviewing the role gender plays in negotiation. After many years of indifference, the study of gender is now an important area of scholarship in negotiation. At the same time as interest has grown, so too have the perspectives on gender and negotiation evolved. Elsewhere, we …
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 Joel Skapinker is on our teaching team in Grenada this week. He, along with Riverdale mediator Elizabeth Hyde and mediate393 mediators Nicole Stewart-Kamanga and Liz Waisberg are delivering training to 35 community leaders as part of the IMPACT Justice Project. See our previous blog for more information about this exciting project.  Our first day of teaching mediation in Grenada was …
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In this part 4 of this blog series, Hilary sets out four practical ethical “rules” which should be considered in mediation practice Four suggestions Given the unique vulnerability of family mediation clients, and taking what exists already in the form of codes of conduct for family mediators, the following is a set of practical ethical “rules” which should, in my view, be the minimum …
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NOTE: Deanne Sowter* recently wrote and contributed this article to the Winkler Institue for Dispute Resolution website  As the 2015/16 OBA Foundation Chief Justice of Ontario Fellow in Legal Ethics and Professionalism Studies, and with the support of The Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution, I am conducting a research project on the links between research and practice, involving empirical research on ethical …
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The family dispute resolution (FDR) field has grown exponentially over the past ten years. This has been in response to the changes occurring in family law generally: more unrepresented people, backlogs in some courts, frustration with a non-specialist family law bench, lawyers becoming disenchanted with the traditional adversarial approaches, increased awareness of the prevalence of family violence, growth in communities …
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It is critical for mediators, during this phase of the mediation, to balance active and non-judging listening, curious questioning and gentle prodding towards the “what’s next”. _______________________________ As with negotiation, the mediation process follows a basic framework. The framework that a mediator uses will be determined by the principles that guide through. At Riverdale Mediation, these are our guiding principles: …
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