Articles tagged: mediator

Listen In

by Les Wallerstein

Mediators rarely accompany their clients to court during their divorce hearings. Most clients don’t share their court experience with their mediators. Even when clients do report what happened in court, their recollections are always subjective, and often imprecise. Now there is an alternative. 

Audio recordings and transcripts of virtually all Massachusetts court proceedings are now available to the public online, including contested and uncontested matters. Everyone: parties, lawyers, and non-lawyer mediators, may register and listen to verbatim court proceedings through a program called “For the Record” (the website with information through the Massachusetts Courts is https://www.mass.gov/service-details/ftr-for-the-record-recording-…

A recent e-mail thread between mediators on the MCFM Board discussed the importance of sharing our favorite mediation-related books with our fellow family mediators. To that end, we are inviting you to comment on this post with a recommendation of your favorite book related to mediation or conflict resolution.  John Fiske  graciously agreed to start us off with a poem and three recommendations:

I hope these blurbs are good for your blog
And help us begin a real dialogue   
To find the right book by hook or by crook
To strengthen your neutral and wise outlook.
  
1. A Guide to Divorce Mediation, Gary Friedman, Workman Publishing (1993). The book opens with a quote from Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who is for me? And being for myself alone, what am I?" This focus on the Self is a…

The Goose, the Gander and the Alimony Reform Act

By William M. Levine and Hon. E. Chouteau Levine (Ret.)

[Note:  to avoid a gender pretzel and to avoid offending anyone, the hypothetical clients in this piece are styled as a married couple of either or both male or female gender.] 

Five years and many appellate cases later, the Alimony Reform Act (eff. March 1, 2012) (“ARA”) now has some meat on its bones. The more we work with it, however, more scenarios emerge that we had not previously considered; and we wonder if the drafters did either. One aspect we have been pondering is how critical elements of the statute address the scenario where former spouses “trade places” after divorce.  In other words, the parties’ earnings change inversely, sufficiently to make the initial alimony payor a putative payee.  

In…

Dear Colleagues and Friends:  

I am honored to have taken on the Presidency of the MCFM and hope that I can fill the shoes of Fran Whyman.  They might be petite and fashionable shoes, but they carried a lot of responsibility and did so with strong and thoughtful steps.  I have started my Presidency with gratitude to Fran and the rest of the past and current Board, with enthusiasm for an organization and a field that I love, and with a story.

My mother-in-law, Naomi Billow, turned 102 at the end of November.  She is independent and travels alone each November from New York to Florida and back to NYC in May. She lives alone and has taken care of herself since 1970 when her husband, a physician, became ill with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and within a few years had to move to a Veteran’s Administration facility.   Naomi visited him faithfully for 7 years before his death.  I greatly admire her loyalty, her independence, her competence, her respect for the institution…