MACM

Part I of four questions posed to Dr. Schneider after he presented at MACM's Annual Conference in 2007.

MACM: What changes in the field of domestic mediation have you observed in the past five years?

Carl Schneider: Perhaps the biggest change in this field is the rise of Collaborative Law (CL) and Collaborative Divorce.  Attorneys have embraced CL as an approach that allows them to avoid the worst practices of adversarial law, and enables them to use their training and skills in a way that feels clearly more useful to their clients. But this new practice challenges the hegemony that mediation has had as the primary alternative form of dispute resolution in the domestic area.

The other major recent change in this field is the embrace of Parental Coordination (PC) by the courts for high conflict couples.  Clearly, the courts are challenged by this population who consume so much of court time and resources.The problem is a big one.  But I would like to see more discussion of the solution we are increasingly turning to.  I am concerned that P.C. is an intervention that can be seen as one that has a third party tell people what to do when they are having difficulty, even great difficulty, in deciding themselves. I fear that sometimes the courts rely on P.C. prematurely and automatically, sometimes before we devoted our best skills to helping people themselves find a way to begin to work together as parents.

Like so many things in contemporary life, the rise of CL & PC means that people are now faced with multiple options from which to choose.  Will they litigate, negotiate through attorneys, have a court-appointed PC, do CL, mediation, or negotiate themselves and file pro se? (It’s like what has happened in the entertainment field: there’s no longer just ABC, CBS, and NBC, there’s also cable, ipods, video games and the internet.)

Part II, III, and IV to be posted over the next week.  Next question, "At MACM's Conference last year you presented a victim-offender mediation film clip.  What can a domestic mediator learn from this?"

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