THE BRIEFING Family law


Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson as mediators in 2005’s Wedding Crashers


GET A ROOM...


Reforms have to led to a sharp increase in divorces being settled out of court. But mediation is no silver bullet, finds Livia Giannotti


BREAKING UP IS hard to do, as Neil Sedaka once sang. But it’s been getting less acrimonious in recent years – at least when it comes to proceedings around divorce in England and Wales. No-fault divorce was introduced in 2022,


which allows couples to separate without having to assert that the other party is at fault. Spear’s research has shown that the move is widely considered to have helped many couples to take the heat out of their split. Then, in April 2024, changes to the Family Procedure Rules were rolled out to encourage divorcing couples to consider non-court dispute resolution (NCDR), steering cases away from courtrooms toward a faster, less acrimonious and more private process.


And it’s worked. Some data shows that


children-related issues and financial dispute resolution (FDR) hearings are increasingly being settled privately; law firm Kingsley Napley reported that 88 per cent of its cases last year involved a private judge – up from 66 per cent in 2023 and just 8 per cent in 2018. This surge is also driven by a broader


definition of NCDR since last year’s changes, which now goes beyond mediation to include collaborative law, neutral evaluation by a third-party and arbitration. ‘NCDR is now a spectrum of options,’ says


Peter Burgess, the founder of Burgess Mee and an accredited mediator. ‘Clients should really only go to court once they’ve exhausted all the options.’


The first port of call for many is mediation. As Stephen Burke, chair of the Family Mediation Council (FMC), explains, it is a process where an independent, professionally trained mediator helps the couple work things out together, enabling them to avoid courtroom confrontation and the stress, delay and cost it can bring. But even mediation can come in ‘lots of


different shapes and sizes’, according to Burgess. Hybrid mediation, for example, lets the mediator speak to each party privately if talks stall – offering more flexibility than the traditional model. The process is confidential, with nothing said used in court, and can involve outside experts or even children through child- inclusive sessions.


ALAMY


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