What Does the Mediation Process Look Like?

What happens in a mediation is that a mediator, who is a neutral, facilitates the voluntary agreements that couples will make about everything that has to go into either a separation agreement or a stipulation of settlement.

I’ll explain the difference between those two documents in a moment but for the purposes of this conversation right now we’ll just refer to it as the agreement. The things that will be covered are the following, we will discuss the different types of custody arrangements there are, we’ll discuss child support, we’re going to talk about the house and what the couple wants to do with the house, and we will also discuss equitable distribution.

New York State is an equitable distribution state and what that means is that everything that the couple has accrued during the term of the marriage, both assets and debts, is subject to dividing it in a fair and equitable way. Now equitable distribution doesn’t necessarily mean 50-50 although it can, but how the couple will decide to divide their assets and debts is a topic of negotiation during the mediation. What will happen is that you go through the mediation process, in other words we address all of these topics and the couple will make their agreements about it.

Once they are resolved we move on to the next topic and then once that’s completed then the mediation is over and the mediator will write up what’s called a memorandum of understanding, which is an agreement that is not a legal document and then that will be converted into either a separation agreement or a stipulation of settlement by an attorney.