Legal terms can be confusing. Family Dispute Resolution is the name that the Family Court uses to describe mediation. Mediators are known as FDR Practitioners. Janine is an accredited FDR Practitioner with the Australian Attorney-General’s Department.
When you can’t agree on how you’ll split up your money or share the parenting of your children after you separate, you can come to mediation (Family Dispute Resolution) to try and reach agreement. You’ll have much stronger chance of avoiding the cost and hurt that the legal process often causes if you do.
At You, Me & Us, accredited FDR Practitioner Janine Moran looks after mediation. As a specialist family mediator focusing on relationships, Janine aims to help you get to better outcomes with less stress and a greater sense of personal power.
Common examples of what you can discuss are:
In many cases coming to FDR (Family Dispute Resolution) is compulsory if you want to go to Court to argue about shared parenting arrangements with children. This has been the case since 2006 when mediation was identified as a constructive way to help resolve conflict and keep matters from choking up the Family Court system. It has been a spectacular success – the number of expensive fights in Court, have reduced significantly since mediation was fully endorsed.
For example, if your case isn’t considered urgent and is a fairly straightforward case without safety issues, you might need to attend mediation and get a certificate from a mediator to say you’ve tried mediation before you can go to Court. If you are unsure about this, it is an important issue to check out with your lawyer.
Some people go to Court to contest matters to do with their children and are ordered back to mediation by a Family Court judge.