BeyondsettLeMent: rethinkingMediationsuccess
Mediation & Arbitration Section Co-Chairs: LaraTibbals – TibbalsMediation, LLC & RachaelRudin – RachaelLedetRudin, PA
whensettlement becomesour measureofsuccess, persistencecanbegin tofeellikepressure.
When I became a Florida Supreme Court Certified Family Law Mediator in 2014, I had a pretty simple way of deciding whether a mediation was successful: Did the case settle?
I actually kept a spreadsheet of my mediations and tracked which ones resulted in full settlement and which ended in impasse. I took those numbers personally and used them to evaluate my own effectiveness as a mediator. Checking the box on the mediator’ s report stating that the parties had reached a full resolution felt like a win. An impasse felt, at least a little, like a loss.
More than a decade later, I see it differently.
I realize now that looking only at settlement versus impasse misses much of what a productive mediation can accomplish. Sometimes ten contested issues become two. Sometimes information exchanged during the mediation changes how a party views the risks ahead. Sometimes the parties develop a proposal that does not produce signatures that afternoon, but ultimately becomes the framework for an agreement days or weeks later.
And sometimes mediation just helps us figure out what is really standing in the way.
We may discover that the parties need a business valuation, one more piece of discovery, or better information about a particular asset before they can make an informed decision. What seemed like a broad, impossible divide at the beginning of the day may actually come down to one fairly narrow issue by the end.
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