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What are your divorce mediation expectations? Mediation is in some ways easy to understand and in other ways difficult. Most people when they think of mediation, they think of negotiation, and that dreaded word “compromise.” Actually, mediation in divorce  or divorce mediation (some call it family mediation) actually means working out a new set of…

Whenever people buy something, there is nearly always a twinge of “buyer’s remorse.” Simply put, buyer’s remorse is the sense that you might have done better if you’d waited, gotten a better price, gotten something different, or done nothing at all. buyer’s remorse is very common whenever a decision is made, mainly because of its…

Most family mediation is really divorce mediation or separation mediation, making two household out of one. In Minnesota this is often done by attorneys, but though attorneys can be very helpful, it is often not necessary to retain or hire an attorney for most divorces or separations. Here’s how to do it. First, find a good mediator- a…

I recently attended a Minnesota AFCC conference. AFCC is an organization devoted to legal professionals. The speaker, a law prof from Canada, spoke of how broken the Canadian and US court systems are with respect to family law (divorce and custody matters). She believed that it was necessary for family law to be taken out of the court…

Summer is here and this is an excellent time to get child custody disputes worked out. I know summer is busy, and summertime is short. Yet when there is beautiful weather and lots of sun, it’s a perfect time to work out parenting and divorce issues because most people feel great. We all have more…

In my Minnesota mediation cases, I occasionally run into folks that are concerned about numbers with child custody and child custody mediation. These people could be attorneys or people who mediate with me. The numbers they are concerned with are the number of child overnights (used in Minnesota to calculate parenting time), 45.1 % (the…

Minnesota divorce mediation is not like California divorce mediation.For one thing, divorce mediation in CA has been up and running a lot longer.It’s a normal process for divorce and nobody thinks about it. Here in Minnesota divorce mediation is different. For one thing, it takes a while for trends on the coast to become “trendy”…

I got a call this morning from a Rochester mediation client. Minnesota mediation clients often call me with questions. A common question is this: “My mediation is court ordered; What do I do?” I’m happy to answer this question, but first I want to explain a bit about court ordered mediations. A court ordered mediation…