Divorce mediation is one neutral professional working with both spouses, instead of two attorneys working against each other.
A divorce mediator works with both of you at once and stays neutral between you. My job is to get the two of you to an agreement you each genuinely accept.
A divorce attorney advocates for one side. My role is different: I help the two of you identify the issues that have to be resolved in your divorce, I educate you both on what California law says about each one, and I guide you to decisions you make yourselves. The judge's role becomes accepting your agreement instead of making your decisions for you.
Most mediators are attorneys; some come from other professions, such as therapists. I am an attorney-mediator. I have practiced family law in California since 1993 and have been mediating divorces since 2006. My practice used to include litigated divorces. Today it is divorce mediation, because I have discovered it is the best way I can help families. That background matters in two places. The legal education you get in my sessions comes from someone who has spent a career in California family law. And the drafting at the end is done by the same person who guided the decisions: the settlement agreement, and the judgment paperwork the court has to accept.
One important distinction: I give you both legal information, not legal advice. I will tell you what the law provides, how a court typically approaches an issue, and where an agreement you are considering departs from that. What I will not do is advocate for either of you. If either of you wants an advocate in your corner, you can bring in a consulting attorney at any point, and mediation continues.
Every divorce mediation I run does four jobs: get you both educated on the law and the issues, exchange the full financial disclosure California requires, work through the issues until you have agreement on all of them, and put that agreement into legal form the court will accept. Here is what that looks like in practice.
We start with a free thirty-minute consultation, ideally with both of you there, in person at my office or online via Zoom. You describe your situation, and I explain how mediation would handle it, what it would cost, and roughly how long it would take. If you decide to proceed, I tell you what your situation is likely to need and we schedule your first session.
You decide together which of you files as the petitioner, and I draft and file the summons and petition that open your divorce case with the court. The timing varies from case to case. This is paperwork, not a court appearance; neither of you goes anywhere.
You each gather your financial documents, and I facilitate the exchange so that you both have what you need to make informed decisions, and to accomplish compliance with California's disclosure requirements. The full section on disclosure below explains what this involves.
In your first session we identify the issues your divorce actually contains. Some couples arrive with one hard question and eight easy ones; some have already agreed on nearly everything. We don't expect you to have anything figured out at the start. We map your needs, and I start the education on the law where you need it. Anything urgent gets addressed right away: a pressing question about the house, the kids, or this month's bills does not wait its turn on a court calendar.
Then we work through the issues: the division of what you own and what you owe, support, and, if you have children, the parenting plan. My job in these sessions is to get you both educated, keep the conversation productive, and put options on the table you may not have considered. You make every decision; I make sure you are both informed and both heard when you make it.
Sessions are two hours, and most couples reach agreement on everything within two of these sessions. A case with more ground to cover takes more time, and that is what the estimate from your free consultation reflects.
When you have agreement on everything, I draft your marital settlement agreement or stipulated judgment, the document that puts your decisions in legal form. You both review it, we agree upon any necessary edits, and I put together a final packet for your notarization and signature. I then submit that packet to the court for the Judge's signature. You never appear in a courtroom.
Most couples finish the divorce mediation work and reach filing in one to two months.
Filing the petition, the paperwork that opens your divorce case, does not start the clock. It starts when the petition is formally delivered to your spouse, which the law calls serving it, or when your spouse files a response with the court, whichever happens first. In mediation we can handle service by mailing the paperwork and having the receiving spouse sign for it, so no stranger has to come knock on your door and formally serve it.
So finishing mediation quickly does not make your divorce final faster than six months. What it does is finish the work: the decisions made, the agreement signed, the paperwork submitted. All that is left running is the waiting period. Most mediated divorces are final in roughly six to eight months.
In many of my mediations the court processes the final paperwork inside the six-month period. When that happens, the judgment is entered with a termination date in it, six months from the date the petition was served. Until that date arrives, neither spouse can remarry, and things tied to the status of the marriage, like health insurance through a spouse's employment, continue.
For comparison, litigated divorces typically take many months and more often years to reach final resolution, because every step moves at the pace of the court's calendar.
California requires spouses in every divorce, on every path, to exchange a full and accurate disclosure of all assets and liabilities, along with income and expenses. This is not a mediation rule or my rule; it is state law, and the court requires each spouse to certify that a complete disclosure was made before it will enter judgment.
The reason for the rule is simple: you cannot make well-informed decisions about dividing what you have unless you both know, completely, what you have. The disclosure has two parts. The forms are a schedule of everything you own and owe, and an income and expense declaration listing all sources of income and your monthly expenses. The supporting documents verify what the forms say.
I oversee your preparation of the forms, and we have proprietary software that holds your hand through the disclosure process. The exchange happens between the two of you rather than in a public court file.
Everything. A mediated divorce in California resolves the same complete set of issues a litigated one does, because the court will not enter a judgment with holes in it. For most couples the set is three things: the property and debt, support, and, if you have children, the parenting plan.
California is a community property state: whatever the two of you accumulated between the wedding and the separation is presumed to belong to you both equally, no matter whose name is on it, and you are each entitled to an equal division of it. That covers the house, the accounts, the vehicles, the retirement earned during the marriage, a business built during the marriage, and it covers the debts the same way.
Separate property is what either of you owned before the marriage, received as a gift or inheritance during it, or acquired after separation. It stays with its owner. Where it gets interesting is where the two got mixed: a separate down payment on a community house, or a retirement account that predates the marriage but grew during it. Part of my job is educating you both on how California sorts those situations out.
Your agreement will inventory all of it, assign values you both accept, and divide it. Where something needs a professional valuation, such as a business, real property, or a pension, we bring in the right outside professional; that is your choice to make, and their fees are separate.
Child support in California runs on a guideline: a state formula, calculated by software, built on each parent's income, certain deductions and tax inputs, and the percentage of time the children spend with each of you. A judge is required to order the guideline amount. Mediating couples have more room: you are required to run the calculation so you both know what the guideline number is, but you are allowed to agree on a different number if you both conclude something else serves your family better.
Spousal support has two phases. Temporary support covers the early part of the divorce, when the income that ran one household suddenly has to run two. For that period a guideline calculation produces the number a court would typically order. Long-term support, the terms that go into your final agreement, is a different analysis: California directs courts away from the calculator there and toward a list of factors in the Family Code, including the length of the marriage, each spouse's earning capacity, and the standard of living enjoyed during the marriage. In mediation we walk through the same factors, and you decide the amount and the duration together.
If you have minor children, your agreement will settle two kinds of custody and a set of practical terms around them.
Legal custody is decision-making: the right to participate in the medical, educational, and social decisions in your children's lives, to talk to their doctors and teachers, and to access their records. Most couples share joint legal custody.
Physical custody is the regular sharing schedule: when the children are with each of you, week by week. It can name a primary parent or split time equally. What matters is that it is built around your children's actual needs, your work schedules, and giving both of you real weekday and weekend time.
The practical terms complete the parenting plan: the holiday schedule, which overrides the regular one so you both get meaningful holiday time; vacation time each parent can schedule with advance notice; and the standard provisions covering phone contact, notice before moves, and agreement before scheduling activities on the other parent's time.
Couples often want to keep the plan simple and work the details out as they go. I push the other way, here and on every custody term: put the detail in writing. It costs you nothing while you are cooperating, because no judge comes knocking when the two of you agree to trade days, and it is the road map you fall back on if the cooperating ever stops. Detail is also what makes the agreement last, so that neither of you keeps returning to court over what was left vague.
Whether your children should have a say in any of this is a separate question. I have written about it in depth: should children have a say in custody decisions.
Mediation is a fraction of the cost of traditional litigation. By working things out collaboratively, you avoid an expensive and stressful legal battle in court.
Avoid the frustration of unexpected court delays or the stress of court-imposed deadlines. With divorce mediation you set the pace, resulting in a process that you control.
Together, we design a parenting plan that works for your family. You determine your own child custody situation, not the Judge or social worker at the Court.
Mediation is confidential and your personal issues are not aired in courtrooms and publicly accessible court files.
You and your spouse know your situation better than anyone. Mediation allows you to make decisions about your future. The Judge's role is to accept your agreement instead of making decisions for you.
Most divorcing couples can resolve their divorce in mediation. I would not have built my practice around it otherwise. But not all, and I would rather tell you where it breaks than find out together after you have paid for sessions.
The decisions rest on the disclosures, and mediation relies on both spouses being forthright about assets, income, and debts. Mediation has no formal discovery process the way litigation does. If documents cannot resolve your doubts about the numbers, you cannot rely on the decisions built on them.
My job includes making sure you both understand the issues and both feel able to speak. Needing support here does not end mediation: a consulting attorney can join the process for either of you. But mediation only works if both of you can participate with confidence.
You two are allowed to make agreements that depart from what the law provides. What mediation cannot handle is an agreement one of you accepts only under pressure from the other. Both of you have to genuinely choose the terms.
If your spouse will not engage, mediation cannot be forced on them. And if either spouse holds an unreasonable position and will not move, the options are accepting an unfair deal or staying stuck. At that point a judge applying the law is quite likely the better path.
The question is whether an environment can be created in which both spouses are genuinely safe, free to speak, and free of coercion. If it cannot, mediation is not the way to proceed.
If none of this describes the two of you, and for most couples none of it does, mediation is the healthier way through. I have written about where the line falls at more length.
That is exactly what the free consultation is for. Thirty minutes, no charge.
For most couples the total is about $3,900. That is one fee for the two of you rather than a fee for each of you, and you will know what to expect before we start. It is built from mediation time at $375 an hour, typically about four hours of it, plus set fees for drafting your agreement and the judgment paperwork. The packages below are illustrations of what different situations cost: $2,700 when your terms are already agreed and need drafting and filing, $3,900 for what most couples use, and $5,400 when there is more to sort out. The free consultation is where I tell you what your situation is likely to need; the full breakdown of each package is on the costs page. The court's own filing fee is separate.
Uncontested
$2,700
Terms already agreed, drafted and filed
Standard
$3,900
What most couples use
Advanced
$5,400
More to sort out
Court filing fees are separate, either $435 or $870 depending on how you proceed.
Barney at A Healthy Divorce made a difficult process feel smooth and fair. He's a thoughtful, balanced mediator who genuinely cares about both parties and keeps everything respectful and on track. Highly recommend.
Barney was terrific at helping us navigate an emotional and impossibly challenging situation. I'm grateful for his calm demeanor and kindness. I highly recommend him.
Barney was always quick to respond and very helpful. He was very patient during the process, and made the whole thing feel smooth and easy.
Barney and his staff are compassionate, professional and very knowledgable. Highly recommended for anyone that wants to make the process of divorce better for all parties involved.
You are not required to have one. Mediation is designed so that one neutral attorney-mediator educates you both; I give legal information, not legal advice. If you would like an advocate, either of you can bring in a consulting attorney at any point, to get legal advice as we go or to review the settlement agreement before signing, and mediation continues alongside. Many of my couples complete their divorce without either spouse hiring an attorney.
Yes. Your agreement is drafted as a marital settlement agreement or stipulated judgment, filed with the court, and entered as your divorce judgment. It ends in the same final divorce decree a litigated case does, enforceable the same way, holding you each to the terms you built. The difference is who wrote the terms: the two of you, instead of a judge.
That's how many people start, with one of you looking into mediation before the other. You're welcome to book the free consultation on your own, although I'd prefer to meet you both if possible. If needed, we can start with one of you, and you can share the information with your spouse. Mediation ultimately requires both of you, but you don't need to be on the same page before we talk. If it helps, send them this page first, and I'm happy to offer your spouse a separate free consultation as well.
Yes. A house or a business does not change the process, it changes the homework: those assets need values you both accept before you can divide them. Where a professional valuation is needed, a business valuator or an appraiser, we bring one in. Choosing to use them is your decision, and their fees are separate from the mediation fee. Mediation also gives us room the court process does not have: we can follow what a court would do, or get creative, like structuring terms that let you hold on to a low mortgage rate. Cases like this are usually what the advanced package exists for.
Mediation has no formal discovery, so it depends on both spouses being truthful in their disclosures. It is voluntary, so it cannot proceed if one spouse refuses to engage. And it has no judge to impose an outcome, so an unreasonable spouse who will not move can stall it. It also relies on both of you understanding the issues and speaking up for yourselves, though a consulting attorney can support either of you inside the process. Where trust is broken beyond repair, where there is coercion or a safety concern, or where one spouse will not be reasonable, litigation exists for a reason. For most couples none of that applies.
We work it. Disagreement is not a failure of mediation; helping couples move from disagreement to agreement is most of the job. Depending on the issue, that can mean reframing it so you each actually hear the other's position, testing the stuck position against what a court would realistically do with it, putting options on the table neither of you had considered, or meeting with each of you separately to lower the temperature. Most stuck issues come unstuck. If one truly will not, you can take that single issue to the court and mediate everything else, but in my experience that is the rare exception.
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