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 (YMU), we have a number of accredited FDR Practitioners. We aim to help you get to better outcomes with less stress and a greater sense of personal power.
Family Dispute Resolution (Mediation) allows you to address a wide range of topics tailored to your unique situation. Common examples include:
Each discussion is designed to help you reach agreements that work for everyone involved.
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.
It is important to note that some people go to Court to contest matters to do with their children and are ordered back to mediation by a Family Court judge who may feel that mediaton is the optimum place for the best outcome.
You call us and arrange a pre-mediation session. This is where you meet with Janinea mediator in private for 75 minutes to discuss your case. They hear your point of view and you tell them what you’re hoping to get out of the mediation. We invite your ex-partner to come along and we arrange for the mediator to meet and talk to them in private too.
At your individual meetings you’ll discuss the best way to run the mediation—with both of you in person in our mediation rooms, or perhaps with each of you in separate rooms (called a “shuttle mediation”) or with one of you on the phone or a videoconferencing link. Our mediators are required under Family Court Legislation to decide after meeting both parties if the case is suitable for mediation. Not all matters are suitable.
If the matter is suitable, we arrange a time for what we call a “joint session” which usually goes for 2 to 3 hours. Read our tips on how to prepare for a joint mediation session on either parenting or property.
At the joint session you will each be asked to say a few words about what you are hoping to get out of the mediation, and then an agenda of the issues is drawn up. We start talking about the issues and as we come up with agreements we capture them in writing. It is very important that nothing gets written on the board unless you both agree 100% with every word.
There are breaks in the mediation where you can check in privately with your mediator —it is important that you are comfortable with how things are going and are not feeling pressured or bullied to agree to something that you’re not happy with.
Given that circumstances vary significantly from couple to couple, mediation can be achieved in one or over a number of sessions. Mediation is about reaching an agreement—this is done in as many sessions as you may need for you both to be satisfied with the outcome.
At the end of the sessions you receive a printed copy of your agreements. You can keep them as non-legally binding agreements that you are both willing to stick to, or take them to a lawyer and have them drawn up into legally binding Court Orders.
You might have heard about certificates from your lawyer or someone else. Our mediators are authorised by the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department to issue you a certificate for the Family Court that might say you tried to come to mediation but that your partner would not participate, or that you tried mediation and it didn’t work, or that she believed mediation to be unsuitable in your case. This allows you to proceed to Court.
If your matter is very urgent, or you have reason to believe that your matter is urgent for the wellbeing of yourself or your children, you should obtain legal advice about this. Check if your matter requires you to wait for a 60i certificate or not. In urgent matters, getting before the Court may be important and may not require a certificate. Please seek legal advice on this as it is important.
Some people have had legal advice when they come to see us, and some haven’t. However, we do not like to mediate unless both parties have received legal advice. It is important that everyone has a realistic idea of what might be considered “fair” in the Family Court. Then they can negotiate an agreement that is fair to both parties and which they won’t regret later.
Sometimes people go back to their lawyer for advice along the way, even calling them in private breaks during the mediation session. This is encouraged if it helps you get an agreement you are fully satisfied with.
Specialist family lawyers will advise you as to whether your agreement is on track. Money spent on legal advice is well spent if it saves you an expensive Court battle. We don’t want to see you wasting money on a Court case—but we are happy to see you spend it on astute advice that will save you money and aguish in the long run. And “good advice” doesn’t include advice from the guy next door or your sister’s friend who used to be a lawyer, the school principal, or anyone else who isn’t a specialist in Family Law. It’s heartbreaking to see terrible outcomes for people who didn’t understand their rights in children’s matters.
Everything you tell our accredited FDRPs in your private session is confidential from the other party. They are highly experienced in dealing with confidential matters.
Most content of a mediation is not admissible as evidence in the Family Court, so generally speaking, it is a confidential process. However, if there are safety issues involved, our records could be subpoenaed by the Court later.
You and your ex-partner set the agenda with your mediator’s help. If you both agree, you can talk about almost anything you’d like that is relevant to the two of you and your children.
For topics look at the property settlement or parenting plan pages—but examples might include:
Yes, grandparents are more than welcome to instigate mediations as an alternate pathway to Court for seeking time with their grandchildren.
Support people are sometimes really helpful to bring along. It is recommended in some cases.
If you’d like to bring a support person the other party needs to approve that person, and their role in the mediation is not to have a voice at the table – just to sit with you and talk to you in the breaks. It is not often helpful to bring a new partner, although very occasionally it has happened and been OK. It is your process, so it is good to talk the issue of support people through at the pre-mediation session.
