E! News reports that Britney Spears and her ex-husband Kevin Federline are using mediation to develop a working custody agreement:

Kevin Federline wants Britney Spears to once again play a major role in their children’s lives. Just not a bigger role than his.

K-Fed’s attorney, Mark Vincent Kaplan, spoke exclusively to E! News in the wake of Thursday’s all-day mediation session, in which both sides were seeking to hash out a custody agreement in advance of an August trial.

“Kevin is seeking to maintain the sole legal and physical custody that he presently has,” Kaplan said. “There’s nothing magical about 50-50. There’s nothing magical about 60-40. What’s magical is that whatever order is in place, it’s the order that best suits the best interest of the children.”

Our 40-hour training course, cosponsored by Institute for Conflict Management, will give participants the opportunity to learn how family law mediators help families create lasting solutions. 

The first 5 attendees to sign up receive a $300 discount on tuition.

Find out more online at:

www.icmadr.com/mediation-certification/divorce-mediation-training.html

While this is not necessarily the best press for the sane, sensible, confidential, and affordable approach to mediation that Peace Talks believes it, as the old saying goes “Any press is good press.”

The post offers 50 tips for dating after divorce.  Some of our favorites are:

Learn to enjoy your own company, use social networking sites, rekindle old interests, and volunteer.  But there are plenty other great tips to choose from that you can check out here.

I will let you draw the connections.

One highlight from the article written by Jill Schachner Chanen reads:

Wider use of alternative dispute resolution is a key reason why more divorce cases are being resolved with less acrimony, say Hunt and other matrimonial lawyers.

“We feel that it has increased client satisfaction,” Chinn says. “We are resolving cases more quickly, for example, by moving immediately to a mediation date, practicing full disclosure, creating asset notebooks with the numbers and your position on them. It’s just to make it easy for the other side.”

Many jurisdictions now mandate mediation in divorce cases, especially where custody is at issue, Herman says. “In one of the counties that I practice in, there is an 80 percent success rate for [resolving] contested custody cases with mediation,” he says.

Check out the entire article here.

This same desire to win, even when it’s impractical, can also creep its way into the divorce process and create unnecessary and damaging results. A spouse may lay claim to an item, even though they know it is something they have no interest in, just to feel victorious. This little victory may feel good, but it can be costly, figuratively and literally.

The win typically leads to tit for tat retaliation from the other soon-to-be ex-spouse. And in the end, the retaliation usually leads to unworkable divorce and custody agreements. Meanwhile, each party is spending more time (read: more money) with their lawyers to try and salvage the things they really wanted to begin with.

In divorce mediation, we try to eliminate the child-like competition and bring practicality back into the process. Couples in a mediation session are given the opportunity to openly discuss their interest in an item and work towards an agreement that ensures everyone can claim a victory.

Consider this, a low conflict traditional divorce, with some negotiation but an uncontested final judgment, can cost around $40,000. The same low conflict divorce reached via mediation could cost as little as $8,500. That’s nearly five times less expensive than the traditional divorce. To put that in perspective, the savings are equal to several all-inclusive two-week trips to Hawaii.

The contrast in price in high conflict divorces is even starker. A fully contested divorce can run a couple as much as $350,000. Compare that to $25,000 for the same divorce resolved in mediation. The savings with mediation can buy you nearly anything you want, including a house in Ft. Lauderdale, a law school education, and a Rolls Royce.

While saving money is not the only or best reason to try mediation, it doesn’t hurt. And knowing that you will have money in the bank during this and future economic crises is reason enough to consider mediation as your sensible alternative to traditional divorce.

While frenemy is a fun word to say, it’s not a fun relationship to have, especially when it is with your soon-to-be ex-spouse. A life change of this magnitude is difficult enough when a relationship is straight forward. It can only get worse if the relationship is duplicitous.
While some complexity in the relationship is expected, the frenemy dynamic is extraordinarily troublesome in mediation because it can distract from creating a workable divorce and custody agreement. For instance, if you think you are working together with your former partner to reach a equitable agreement, meanwhile both of you are attempting to undermine the other by omitting details or sharing incorrect information, the final product will be a waste of both your time and money.

To reach usable result in mediation, the couple must be straight forward and honest. Even if you and your spouse share a strong dislike for one another, there is a benefit in knowing where the other person really stands. This is not to say that being cordial is not an asset to a successful mediation, but manipulating your partner can only have negative impact in the end.

Below is one of the best points in the article:

The reason many people do not even think about getting ready for a divorce is because they operate under the assumption that the sooner you can get out of a stressful situation the better. So there is a natural tendency for people who are in difficult marriages to want to get the divorce over with as quickly as possible in order to move on with their lives. Family and friends often encourage this as well. They hurt for the family and so also prescribe to the myth that the quicker the divorce is over, the sooner everything will return to normal. But unfortunately in most cases just the opposite happens. Couples who make rushed decisions to leave the marriage have had no time to evaluate their feelings, thoughts or options. As a result they are unprepared for the roller coaster of emotions, the complicated legal system and the many life changing decisions that they need to make. Quite often they make agreements which they cannot sustain, and instead of the situation getting better, they often find that they have just traded one set of problems for another. So it is no wonder that they often get tangled up in lengthy court cases and the very thing they hoped for, a quick divorce, often takes years.

To read more from this article, you can check it out on mediate.com