In mediation we often ask our clients 2 key problem solving questions;
- what can they each do to meet each other’s concerns and fears.
- What can they do to support each other so that they can more effectively and efficiently support their children as one cohesive unit.
Aren’t the same questions relevant to our relationship with family lawyers?
Like the parent’s responsibility to mutually supporting their children, lawyers and mediators have a responsibility to constructively collaborate for the benefit and support of their mutual clients.
Mediators are and continue to receive unprecedented support, attention and funding from the Government.
This attention and support has very effectively, even if unintentionally, polarised the traditional lawyer/mediator relationship with each profession focusing on protecting their own interests and often undermining each other.
The result is that lawyers are finding more and more ways of retaining clients to avoid ‘losing them’ to mediation. Now this might be based on ignorance about how mediation can benefit the couple, a commercial imperative to stay in business or simply a dislike of mediation and mediators. I am sure there are other reason.
Mediators on the other hand are looking at more and more ways of attracting clients without having to rely on solicitor referrals who they often feel treat them as ‘second class’ professionals.
These polarise approaches have been very effective at dividing the professions! It is a classic conflictual situation where one profession feels that their interests, values and identity is being threatened by the other. It is a situation which needs acknowledging and addressing quickly!
The challenge for the mediators and lawyers is how to support each other for the client’s benefit whilst satisfying their own interests.
One answer is surely a more mutually supportive and integrative way of working. The sooner we see and understand each other as inter-dependent members of the client’s divorce/separation problem solving team, fulfilling quite different albeit mutually supportive roles, the sooner we can all begin the process of challenging and changing the culture of fear and competition which defines many family mediation/lawyer relationship.
Let’s all look at collaborative ways of working in the best interest of our clients. That’s the challenge for 2015 and beyond.