Southern California attorney Brian Don Levy has an excellent video of himself posted on-line which describes divorce mediation and its benefits. I’ve embedded it below. He is a collaborative attorney and lends the impression that the attorneys are present during the mediation sessions, which is generally not the case in most divorce mediations.
He very nicely sums up the benefits to the family:
Divorce mediation can have a really positive affect on your family, because you’re resolving your dispute privately, fairly, and you’re taking responsibility for the resolution by coming to an agreement. So typically when people walk out of court and they’ve been forced to do something, it can have a devastating affect on the family. It can effect how you look at your whole family: how you look at your children, how you look at the other parent, your emotional makeup; the whole landscape of feelings that you go through. When you walk away from mediation, you’re usually feeling pretty good about your family because you’ve come to an agreement and nobody forced you to do it. So you’re feeling good about that.