Category Archives: Family Mediation

Meaningful intake interviews and effective screening for power imbalances lie at the heart of family mediation. A complete and accurate assessment of the parties’ respective sources of negotiation power to help inform process choice is the most important predictor of successful mediation. The next most important predictor is the degree to which the clients (and their lawyers) are well prepared. …
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1. What is “Screening”? Screening is a triaging process that has been used by mediators for years to help them provide safe and balanced mediations. The mediator meets separately with each party, before agreeing to take the case, and elicits specific information that will help the mediator “diagnose” their complex relationship dynamic. The main purpose is to ascertain whether bringing …
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Family mediation is like a stepping stone in a fast-running brook. It usually will get you to the other side safely and dry. But sometimes the stone wobbles and another stone must be tried. MORE

Our 40 hour Basic Family Mediation course is rich with useful content designed to teach the fundamentals of family mediation, including this helpful flowchart, which is an excerpt from those training materials:

This short workshop was an excellent introduction for mediators and a great refresher for family law lawyers regarding the different sources of income and how they may affect income calculation for support purposes. The presenter, family law lawyer and mediator, Angela Princewill, was knowledgeable, friendly and funny. She did an excellent job presenting this difficult and important topic, from both perspectives, …
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When you tell someone that you are an actor, their immediate question is: “What have I seen you in?”. There is my usual response to the various commercials, tv, and film roles I’ve done; but what they don’t know is the impact my job as an actor has had in real life with real people. People like the participants doing mediation training with Hilary at Riverdale Mediation. This always …
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As family mediators, we work “in the shadow of the law”. Our job is to help parties reach agreements that are better for them than their alternatives… meaning mediators must know what a court would do with a given situation. We also must put the interests of children first, and decline to mediate parenting outcomes that we believe will not …
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The crisis in access to family law justice has led to many great things happening outside of court. Collaborative practice, for example, has grown from disenchantment with the adversarial legal system’s assumption that positional bargaining necessarily protects the interest of parents and their children. Family mediation has become the go-to solution for both the public– seeking to avoid paying lawyers– …
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