- Speed: Avoid the court conga line and possibly get divorced in less than a year. After the mediation agreement is written, your review attorney can incorporate the document into a marital settlement agreement, file it with your county’s family court, and secure a date to finalize your divorce.
- Sanity: Do you want to hang on until 2024 to legally, emotionally, and financially begin your new life, your kids’ new schedules or figure out what happens to the house? That sounds like stress on steroids- for everyone.
- Savings: With Mediation you pay hourly per session and may only need four to six sessions to hammer out your divorce terms (depending on communication styles and complexity of issues). If you each hire an attorney, pay a retainer of $5,000 apiece at $400 an hour, your five thousand dollars will evaporate with 12.5 billable hours. After 12-18 months waiting for the court to play catch-up, the amount owed to a lawyer could be staggering. Click on the link below to read about a three-year, $100K saga.
- Spare the Kids: Do not let two or three years of kids’ childhood or adolescence be defined by your divorce. Any disagreements requiring your lawyers to intervene during the court shutdown will add multiple months to a timeline that’s already delayed through mid-2024. Remember: Actions and Words Matter – Your Kids are Watching.
- Successful Co-Parenting Strategies: Mediation helps many couples develop improved communication because together, instead of sparring through attorneys, they’ve exchanged ideas, dissected their feelings, and crafted creative solutions. As a result, they forged the tools needed to start their lives apart while beginning their co-parenting roles for years to come.
For a mid-2023 update, read Divorce, Civil Trials To Halt In Passaic Co. Amid NJ Judge Shortage | Wayne, NJ Patch
For 2022 conditions still spilling over to 2024,
Read about a NJ divorce that’s still not over after three years and $100K attorney fees in “A ‘catastrophic’ shortage of judges is disrupting the lives of thousands in NJ”
Click here: NJ judge shortage causing backlog from county to state Supreme Court (northjersey.com)
Need more information? This link delves into NJ’s divorce delay details.