Family law disputes are often highly emotional, adversarial, and expensive, but there are more options than simply seeking a court order. With this in mind, the Family Law Society, Gators for Alternative Dispute Resolution, and the UF Institute for Dispute Resolution hosted the Family Law Mediation Workshop on Friday.
Tina Jaeckle, a family and dependency mediator and trainer, spoke to a crowd of more than 80 students about the benefits of mediation, the pitfalls that a successful mediator must avoid, and how best to help parties come to their own agreement.
That the agreement is their own, and not one passed down by the mediator, was crucial, Jaeckle said, calling self-determination “the heart of mediation.” Not only is this vitally important, she said, but it is what differentiates mediation from the courts.
“People have the right to make their own decisions, that’s what mediation is about. Can they do that in the courts? Absolutely not. So when we are describing the mediation process, the bottom line is, you have come to the table to make your decisions, the best decisions you can, for you and your family.”
Jaeckle quickly made it evident that the workshop would be highly interactive for the students, asking questions and using the answers to illustrate the difficulties posed by family law disputes. “By the way, have you noticed yet that I’m not just going to talk to myself for two hours?” she asked, drawing laughs from the crowd.
Jaeckle also purposely took students a bit out of their comfort zone by asking them to state what assumptions they had made about her when they first walked in the room. After almost every assumption turned out to be wrong, Jaeckle used the point to illustrate how easily mistakes can be made.
“If you come in as a mediator, size people up, and automatically assume, could you be wrong?” she asked rhetorically, “Absolutely.”
She added that assumptions are normal human behavior, but when they’re drawn on our own past experiences, as they often are, they can often interfere with those most important characteristics of successful mediators: neutrality and impartiality.
“We have to be very, very careful about assumptions, folks,” she said.
Jaeckle spent several minutes underscoring the importance of impartiality, but also made sure to tell the students that mediators are empowered to remove themselves from the situation if they are unable to be neutral.
“If, under any circumstance,” she said, “I feel that I am in over my head and I am going to go forward and do something that I feel is unethical or not right under any standard that I uphold as a mediator, I get to do what? Stop.”
Jaeckle finished by demonstrating these methods with the help of four third-year law students who took part in a mock mediation. Jackie-Jo Brinson and Jamel Brown acted as the separating couple, with Donna Vincent and Saberin Jamshed acting as their respective attorneys.
The students drew laughs from the crowd as they acted out the contentious situation. Allegations of infidelity and the resulting personal attacks threatened to derail any productive discussion, but Jaeckle was able to use her methods of firm ground rules and private meetings to move the parties to discuss the real matters of the situation.
