The Mediator - Susan Kaye

What are the outcomes of family mediation?   When a mediation process is successfully concluded, you will both have reached an agreed understanding about how you want to go forward. Susan will put this understanding into a document and, if the issues involve finance, she will prepare a document setting out both clients’ full financial circumstances.

It is important to be aware that the document setting out yours and your former partner’s mutually acceptable proposals, which is called a Memorandum of Understanding, is a highly confidential document. It is not a formal legal document. In most cases both of you will take the Memorandum of Understanding to your respective solicitors so that you can have the benefit of legal advice in respect of the agreed proposals and then have those proposals drawn up into a legally binding document.

Both you and your former partner will be encouraged to get legal advice at appropriate points during the mediation process as this can help you both negotiate successfully and enable each of you to be aware of your position under the law.

When mediation is successfully resolved, you, the clients decide, with the help of any legal advisors who are consulted, what the next steps may be.

Generally, these are the options:

• To take the matter no further
• To instruct solicitors to exchange letters confirming the agreed proposals
• To instruct solicitors to draw up a legally binding agreement
• To instruct solicitors to draw up the necessary papers so that a judge can be invited to make a consent order of the court. When the issues are concerned with finance and property, generally speaking a consent order of the court is the best way to ensure that the couple’s intentions are made binding