It’s been said that estate mediation is like divorce mediation on steroids. Having experience at both, we concur. Although both are extremely emotional and personal for the parties, there are a couple of aspects that set estate mediation apart. Fortunately, there also are measures, identified below, for “special handling.”
The Process and Its Impact
In divorce mediation—and by “divorce” in this context we include unmarried couples as well as married ones—there are specific decisional goals the couples must achieve. Some decisions, such as who moves out and who gets the dog, they will have considered. Others, such as how they will divide retirement savings and who will get the kids to school in the morning, they probably won’t have considered in sufficient detail. Either way, no matter how heated or painful the discussion becomes, the mediator will be able to use these decisional goals as a means to keep the couple relatively focused and the discussion more or less on track.
