Mediation

You'll still be in each other's lives. Divorce like it.

If you've thought any of these, we should talk.

"I don't want this to harm my children."

"I want us to be excellent co-parents."

"I'm tired of walking on eggshells."

"I don't want to work with a lawyer. I'm still traumatized from my parents' divorce."

That last one I hear more than any other. People who lived through their parents' divorce as children arrive determined not to hand the same thing down. That instinct is right, and it's the best possible starting place.

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What this actually is

Divorce can be treated two ways.

You can treat it as a pile of things to divide — the house, the bank account, the furniture, the kids — with each of you trying to come away with more.

If you flinched at the last one, you're in the right place. The court won't. It counts children in days and percentages and who gets Christmas this year.

Or you can treat it as the end of a marriage between two people who will still be in each other's lives, and who would like that to be bearable.

For everyone in your family.

I do the second. The three of us in a Zoom room — the two of you, and me between you — working through what has to be decided until you reach something you can both live with. At the end, you have a separation agreement or a memorandum of agreement, depending on where you live.

I recently mediated for a couple with no children. What they had was a dog named Maisie and jobs in the same industry. They needed help not turning it into a transaction. That's the work.

What you end up with

An agreement, obviously. But that isn't really the point of it.

What families tell me afterwards is that they feel peace. The walking on eggshells stops. They've had the conversations they were most frightened of and come out the other side of them. They've been heard — and, which is the harder half, they've listened.

And then they find they can go to a wedding, or a graduation, or a hospital, and sit together.

I know what that's worth, because I didn't expect to have it. I practised family law. I knew precisely what divorce does to two people, and I assumed mine would end with my ex-husband and me as enemies. The one thing I refused to do was put my children through a traditional divorce.

My former parents-in-law died five years apart — him first, her recently. They were Ukrainian Catholic and they did not believe in divorce. Each of their obituaries names me, as the mother of their grandchildren. I sat with the family at her funeral, because my daughter wanted me there and her father agreed.

That is what this work makes possible.

Who this works for

This tends to go well when:

• Neither of you has hired a lawyer yet. This matters most, because it means no one has been humiliated yet by the legal system. That's where good intentions go sideways.

• You don't want to divorce the way your parents did.

• There's someone who needs you both. Children, usually. Sometimes a dog. Sometimes a business or a shared professional world small enough that you'll keep running into each other.

• One of your children is neurodivergent. You already know how much depends on the two of you staying coordinated, because you've been doing it for years.

• Your kids are everything to you — not in the sense of theme parks and an iPad at four, but in the sense of being a responsible parent.

• You know it's important to get along afterwards because that's what's best for the kids.

• You want this finished. Not tomorrow — but finished. Three weeks between sessions, seven months, done.

Who this isn't for

I'd rather tell you now than after you've paid for an hour of my time.

Your lawyer has already told you this will never settle. If you're here to prove mediation was tried before heading to court, I'm not the person. That's a box-ticking exercise, and I'm not interested in being the box.

You only want one session. No family reaches a complete agreement in the first session, and they aren't meant to. The first session does something else — it's where we settle that the children come first, and everything afterwards is built on top of that.

Here is a basketball anecdote that illustrates my approach ~

John Wooden won ten national championships at UCLA. On the first day of practice every year, he taught his players how to put their socks on: smooth at the heel, no wrinkles. A wrinkle makes a blister, and a blister costs you a season. Nobody turns up to basketball practice hoping to learn about socks.

It took years to arrive at this point. It would take years to resolve in court. One meeting produces an agreement that lasts until the first time it's tested. I want people prepared to do the work for a settlement that holds under pressure and over time.

You want to put a price on the $10 slow cooker. I've seen it. If the two of you need to argue about a ten-dollar slow cooker, the argument isn't about the slow cooker, and I'm not the right person to referee it.

You blame your spouse for all of it, and none of it is yours. This works when both of you can name your own part in how things went. If you're certain it's entirely their doing, you'll find me frustrating.

Why me

I've practised family law. That's the honest answer to why I don't do this the way it's usually done — I've seen close up what the usual way costs, and who ends up paying for it.

I've also served as an adjudicator in landlord-tenant disputes. Two people would sit in front of me giving completely incompatible accounts of the same events, and my job was to work out what had actually happened.

You learn a few things doing that for long enough. Mostly that the most confident version of events isn't reliably the most accurate one, and that the person who speaks best isn't automatically the person who's right. The truth is somewhere in between.

I brought that with me. Not to decide things for you — that isn't what mediation is — but so that the quieter one doesn't get talked over, and so what you end up agreeing to reflects what's actually true rather than who argued hardest.

And before any of it, I practiced judo. I placed third at the national championships in my age group as a teenager. Judo means the gentle way, and its oldest principle is that softness controls hardness — you don't meet force with force, you step with it and let it go past. You also can't practise it alone. You need a partner, not an opponent.

That isn't a metaphor I picked up later to describe what I do. It's how I learned to stay steady in a room with someone who is pushing.

What working with me looks like

Everything happens over Zoom. I work with families across North America, so there's no travel and no waiting rooms — and you don't have to be in the same room to do this.

1. A private conversation with each of you. Twenty to thirty minutes, separately, so I hear from each of you without the other there.

2. The three of us together. I tell you both what I heard, and we discuss options. This is when you decide together whether we’ll work together and what it'll cost. 

3. Sign a Mediation Agreement and pay a deposit

4. Preparation. A questionnaire and a private ninety-minute conversation with each of you. This is where I learn how the two of you actually communicate — where things get stuck, what tends to make a hard conversation harder, what has worked between you before. Every family is different, and I'd rather bring the right tools to yours than run everyone through the same process.

5. The mediation sessions. Ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes each, three weeks apart. Four in the shorter package, nine in The Gentle Way. Three weeks is deliberate — long enough to gather what's needed, think, and let a hard conversation settle; short enough that nothing goes cold. The first session isn't about reaching agreement. It's the foundation, where we establish that the children come first, and everything after it rests on that.

6. The last session is your agreement. We spend it going through the document together, making sure it says what you actually meant and that it's in your words rather than anyone else's. You ask questions. I answer them and make the changes in real time while we're meeting on Zoom. 

You'll come away with a separation agreement or a memorandum of agreement, depending on where you live.

If you're in Canada, I prepare child and spousal support calculations using DivorceMate — the same software family lawyers use — so your numbers are calculated the way the system does.

And I won't let your file go quiet. Mediations rarely fail outright; they drift. Six weeks becomes four months, and then somebody's lawyer sends a letter. Since we're meeting every three weeks, six weeks means one has been missed — so that's when I reach out, and we book a twenty-minute call to get things moving. That's included, and it's a large part of why the timelines hold.

Between sessions, you can reach me at kim@kimkorven.com for anything that can't wait until we next meet. I reply within 24 hours, Monday to Friday.

Fees

Almost everyone who comes to me is frightened of ending up with nothing. That fear is reasonable. But it's worth being clear about what actually causes it: it usually isn't the size of the bill — it's not knowing what the bill will be.

A mediator charging by the hour is cheaper per hour and open-ended. Two lawyers on a contested file are open-ended and slow. Neither can tell you today what this will cost you by the end.

I can. You'll know your total before we start, and it doesn't change.

The Gentle Way Mediation — $17,500 + applicable taxes ( you’ll split it between you ).
Everything described above: nine mediation sessions, support between sessions ( if required ), a separation agreement or a memorandum of understanding, plus My Lawyer Free Divorce Course. Nine sessions three weeks apart, finished within seven months. This is the right fit for most families with children.

The Gentle Way Lite Mediation— $8,500 + applicable taxes (you’ll split it between you )
Four mediation sessions, for couples without children — a pet counts — where the property is straightforward. The same process, finished within four months.

In both, the final session is spent on your agreement.

Set that against the alternative.

In 2018, the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family and the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice asked 166 family lawyers what their own cases actually cost. A high-conflict family dispute taken through the courts averaged $54,390 in legal fees and 27.7 months to resolve. That figure is one person's lawyer — not the two of you combined. The most expensive single case reported was $625,000.

The same kind of dispute, resolved through mediation, averaged 13.7 months. And more than 83% of the lawyers surveyed disagreed that litigation is fast or efficient. That's lawyers saying it, about their own profession.

That was 2018. Nothing about the court system has become quicker or cheaper since.

Paying for Mediation. Instalments are the normal way this works. Nobody is asked to hand over the whole amount at once.

Once the three of us agree we're a good fit, a $ 1,500 deposit confirms your place — I work with only three families at a time — and I prepare your mediation agreement. That deposit isn't refundable.

The balance is spread across monthly payments as we work, with the balance paid before your final session.

If your situation needs a different schedule, say so on our first call. It's a normal conversation, and it doesn't change how I work with you.

If we go past the agreed timeframe, additional sessions are $1,500 + applicable taxes. Most families never see this, because of the six-week check-in above.

The first step

A private conversation with me, twenty to thirty minutes, to see whether this is a fit. Your spouse will have their own.

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