Family Mediation Quarterly: President’s Letter

Dear Mediators: The most recent professional development meeting, “Collaborative Law and Mediation Tools and Techniques: A Common Ground” was a product of the joint committee of the MCFM and the Massachusetts Collaborative Law Council chaired by our own Lynn Cooper.  The panelists, in addition to Lynn, were Dan Finn, Kate Fanger, Karen Levitt, and Lisa…

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MCFM President's Letter: The Genius of Family

On September 13, as most of you know, MCFM marked an important milestone – our 30th anniversary.  We honored the occasion with an event at the Endicott House in Dedham.  Thanks to the organizers (in alphabetical order – Lynn Cooper, Barbara Kellman, Diane Spears, Laurie Udell, and Fran Whyman,) it was a well-attended and unqualified…

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More questions than answers for mediators after ‘Bott’

The following letter to the editor of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly was published on August 23, 2012. Please click here to download the PDF. To the editor: The recent Supreme Judicial Court opinion, In the Matter of Bott, 462 Mass. 430 (2012), has attracted widespread attention in the local mediation community. Because of its potential ramifications, many…

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MCFM FPresident's Message

Dear Mediators: I am so honored that you, my peers, have elected me President and hope that, over the next two years, I prove worthy of the choice. For those of you who don’t know me, I have been practicing law for 21 years and the last 16 have been in the family law area.…

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Jonathan E. Fields elected president of the MCFM

On May 1, Jonathan Fields was elected President of the Massachusetts Council on Family Mediation for a two-year term. He is honored to have been chosen by his peers in an organization in which he has served as an Executive Board member since 2005. The MCFM is a non-profit organization established over twenty-five years go…

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Marriage Foundation Recommends Mediation

“Judges do not traditionally speak out about the social issues that manifest themselves in their courts,” wrote Lesley Garner, Telegraph journalist and former advice columnist. So it’s somewhat surprising that Sir Paul Coleridge, a senior family court judge in the UK founded the Marriage Foundation, a campaign that promotes, among other things, mediation prior to…

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Agree on Divorce Mediation

Statistics throughout the recession indicate spouses who might otherwise divorce are staying married due to financial constraints. Divorce attorneys want their clients to be absolutely certain they want a divorce; however, when couples don’t see a way out of poorly functioning marriages, they can become volatile. So while divorce isn’t for everyone, for those who…

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Lawyer-Mediator’s Subsequent Representation of Party

A Nebraska attorney served as a mediator for an unmarried couple in a child custody dispute; later, after the mediation had concluded, this same attorney represented the mother against the father in a suit involving the father’s alleged wrongful theft of certain of the mother’s property. The father sought to disqualify the attorney on the…

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Sons of Divorce

Studies examining the effects of divorce on children are rarely ever positive — and a recent study lead by Dr. Esme Fuller-Thomson of the University of Toronto is no exception. Writing in the journal Psychiatric Research, Dr. Fuller-Thomson found that male children whose parents divorced are three times more likely to consider suicide than males whose…

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