In recent years there has been a growing interest in divorce mediation, which is a process for helping divorcing parties reach a settlement agreement in a cooperative manner rather than having them battle it out in court for the judge to decide the issues.
Mediation lets the parties keep control of the process and of the terms of the divorce.
Mediation, if successful, is likely to be much less expensive and much less stressful on the parties than fighting it out in court. It even tends to be less stressful and expensive than adversarial negotiations with each party having a separate lawyer with months of discovery, communications, and a series of proposals and counter proposals. Although mediation may be bypassed if the court finds that requiring mediation will cause undue hardship or would endanger the health or safety of one of the parties, in most cases mediation is mandatory before the court will allow the parties to go ahead with a custody battle. This court-ordered mediation is usually done with a county mediator associated with the court system either by employment or by contract. The mediation is limited to issues related to custody and placement.