Video – Attorney Bill Leininger Explains Why Divorce Mediation May Not Succeed For Every Couple

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

Why wouldn’t everybody use divorce mediation and stay out of court?

Bill Leininger – Divorce Mediation Attorney – Richmond County, NY

That’s the reason why I tell everyone, you know, you really have to be kind of dumb not to at least explore divorce mediation because the benefits are so great. Now some people will ask at that free consultation, “well Bill, I have a question for you. If divorce mediation is so wonderful, why doesn’t it succeed 100% of the time?”

Because I tell them that approximately 94% of the people who retain me as a divorce mediator succeed, sign a marital settlement and agreement, and get a divorce on an uncontested basis very quickly.

So why isn’t it 100%?

The truth of the matter is, it’s not 100% because that approximately 6% of the people who bust on the mediation usually fall into two categories, and let me be blunt. Especially in my New York office, Mr. Green is very, very, very big, okay? I’ll never forget a guy came in and I said, what do you do for a living? And he said, Oh, I’m a, I’m a busboy in an Italian restaurant. And in those days, I had a commercial building, and I looked out to the parking lot and I saw that fella had a $120,000 Mercedes-Benz, you know, very high end.

And as the case went by, I saw the house was over a million dollars. So, I had to assume the guy wanted me to think he was making 25,000 a year and he was a busboy. But he really, presumably, owned the business. So, you have Mr. Green, people don’t want to tell the truth… that they’ve heard that the judges can award very substantial alimony to the spouse and very substantial child support.

So, they want to save money. So, they want to lie about how much money they made.

You might say, well, the spouse probably knows everything. I had one case where the spouse was the bookkeeper for the last 30 years. She did know everything, but I have other cases where the wife will say, I have no idea what he does. I know it’s a lot of finagling back and forth and, you know, he has a real, in my opinion, a low-class accountant. I don’t know what they’re doing. And I get scared every year about signing a joint tax return.

So, you have that group of people who just don’t know what’s going on.

So, let’s talk about that classification. A couple where there’s no communications about the true finances, for example, very dangerous to do divorce mediation because all the abilities to subpoena records, to compel invoices from your major suppliers and stuff like that, you don’t have in divorce mediation. Only way I get those documents is if the husband and wife sign authorization and if one person wants to be sharp… he says, no, If that’s what has to be done, then I’m not doing it. That’s one group.

And the second group is a certain small percentage of people in this country are nuts. Okay. They truly are. They would rather spend $50,000 fighting over something.

I had one case, 15 years ago, and the fellow had three sessions about where he was going to pick up the kids on the interstate highway between New York and Florida.