In this conversational interview, family law attorney and mediator Scott Levin and certified divorce financial analyst (CDFA) Tanya Arae discuss the fundamental differences between divorce mediation and litigation in California. Levin outlines how mediation typically resolves cases in about two months versus the average two‑year timeline for contested litigation, emphasizing the significantly lower costs and the collaborative nature of mediation. He explains that clients retain control over decisions, directly negotiate issues such as property division, retirement accounts, and parenting plans, and receive guidance from a neutral mediator rather than following a lawyer’s rigid playbook. Arae highlights the financial advantages of mediation, noting that litigation incurs thousands of additional dollars and burdens parties with extensive paperwork, while mediation allows a CDFA to present community‑property rules and help couples make informed choices. They also discuss how mediation provides more time and flexibility to craft customized, enforceable parenting plans, reducing future court disputes. Finally, Levin confirms that his office handles all court filings—including petitions, responses, and marital settlement agreements—so clients do not need to navigate the filing process themselves.
Chapters
Hey everybody, this is, uh, Scott Levin, uh, Chief Peacekeeper. I'm a family law attorney, uh, and mediator, uh, based in California. I'm here with Tanya Arae. Hi Tanya, how are you?
Hi Scott, thanks for having me again. I'm great.
Absolutely. Tanya is a fantastic certified divorce financial analyst. I've worked with her for— gosh, Tanya, before the pandemic, right?
Oh my gosh, before the pandemic. Can you believe it?
Yeah, we had less wrinkles back then.
We did.
Or I did.
I definitely did. And I had less gray hair then, but that's okay.
That was okay. You know, gray hairs are good. So Tanya had an interesting idea for a quick video. Basically, I guess, Tanya, why don't you introduce it and we'll go from there?
So, Scott, I wanted to come back on to ask you a question that I get all the time. As a CDFA, people come to me about their finances, right? Then they start asking legal questions, which I simply cannot answer. But the biggest question I get is, what is the difference between going through mediation and going through litigation? What does that look like? Do I involve my spouse? Do I not involve my spouse? Exactly what the difference is. The difference?
It's a huge difference. So what's the difference between hiring a divorce lawyer Lawyer versus mediator for to navigate the process. Well, lots of differences. I'll kind of try to hit them quickly, and then of course, Tanya and I have both written about this. We'll put links to where you can find some more information. But generally, as a mediator, I don't litigate cases. So the timeline that my clients are on is highly expedited versus a litigated case. You know, the average litigated divorce, whether you're fighting or not, once you bring in lawyers, it form it makes it more formal. So it's like almost 2 years in the contested process versus, you know, the average case that I'm working on is about 2 months. So it's a much faster process to get to a settlement and get everything signed. It's much less expensive, obviously. The end result, though, is a judgment that's enforceable by the State of California. So the end result is the same, is an agreement on the same scope of terms. It's just a quicker, more collaborative approach. And when you're— when you hire an attorney for divorce, one thing that you'll find, and that's not, you know, sometimes that's required, right, to have an attorney and go to court. You won't— you won't really be in control of the case, right? Like, you hire an attorney, they have their playbook for how they handle divorce cases, and you or none of their clients are going to get them off that playbook. So you're not going to be able to, you know, push it faster. You're not going to be able to divert from their— the way that they do discovery or exchange of financial docs. You're going to kind of be— that person's going to kind of become everything to you. And you won't really have a say in a lot of like what's happening in mediation. It's completely different, right? The mediator is there helping you guys, you know, talk things out. But it's really you and your spouse. That, that are coming to the agreements. So you're making your own decisions. You're getting informed, and you're making, and you're getting knowledge about your options. But it's really you guys are talking things out directly. So you're staying in control. You're more understanding of what's happening because you're talking directly about the issues. You're not talking about court cases from 1981 that your attorney is referring to. Or, you know, code sections. It's about, hey, what do you want to do with the house? Let's talk that out. You both own cars. What do you want to do with those vehicles? What about your 401? So you're really kind of being presented the issues, and then you're being given the opportunity to talk those things out and arrive at decisions. So the control that people experience is way, way different in a mediated settlement versus litigation.
Well, as a CDFA, I always push toward mediation, right? Because my job is to watch the money throughout the case. And litigated divorces are so much more expensive. I'm not talking $5,000 expensive. I'm talking about thousands and thousands and thousands more. So I feel like if couples can come to an agreement on their own with a mediator such as yourself, then we're saving a lot of time and money, in which case I have more to help them budget with after the fact, right? But I also feel every time I see a litigated case, I'm buried in paperwork. I'm buried in statements for years and years to come that actually aren't necessarily relevant anymore. Whereas I feel like in mediation, we can really focus on what we need today, what we need, yeah, maybe at the date of marriage, depending on the length of time. But I feel like litigation is just this drawn-out process that God knows when it ends, right?
It's very formal. You know, when you have an attorney of record, they're responsible for the case in so many ways, and they're obligated to do things That really bring a lot of formality to the situation. Sometimes that's good, but a lot of times people, you know, kind of get buried in it.
And I feel like the nice thing about mediation is you can present the options, what's supposed to happen supposedly during California, by California law, but they get to decide, this is— that's not exactly where we want to land. That's not— and that's how it works on the financial part. I, you know, present them with what's supposed to happen according to the community property Division. But then I say, but this is all up to you. You take this to your mediator ideally and decide if that's how you want this financial split to be. My job is to show a couple when I work as a neutral just what it is.
That's so critical. So you're getting the benefit of the knowledge of someone like Tanya, but then you're making your own decisions and kind of negotiating that in a way that, you know, has a lot of time You know, saves you a lot of stress, saves you a lot of money. You know, the other thing on the child side, obviously parenting. I mean, you guys know, you know, people know their kids better than a court ever will, right? Or 2 lawyers. And when it comes to parenting plans in court, you know, you have a very— you go into the, you know, your hearing with the, with the essentially the mediator for child custody, and you get like 45 minutes or an hour. And they're like checking the box on all these things. And, and, and you really— almost everybody feels unfulfilled coming out of that meeting. They didn't have enough time. They couldn't explain themselves. They, they didn't get across that their kids are, you know, would be better off doing it this way or that way. And those are all the sort of things you do get to discuss in mediation. You get more time. You get to make a plan that's more customized to to your kids and to each other. And, you know, people usually end up with much more enforceable agreements because of that, because they made the agreements together. There's a lot less going to court later in mediation to fight about custody because both people had a say in how the plan was created.
Nice. My other question for you is really my last question for today is, do you also file the paperwork? In other words, the complaint, the petition, the response, all of those. Would you mind commenting on that? Yeah.
So I'm do— I'm helping people arrive at the agreements. That's kind of what a mediator does. And then I'm doing all the court filings. So we initiate the case. We do all the court preparation, court filing. I draft their marital settlement agreements myself. And, you know, so I file all of that. So basically, our clients aren't going to court. They aren't having to worry about, you know, how to get things filed or how to fill out forms. It's really Our office is kind of taking that over for them. The hard part is they, they have to come to agreements, and then we will execute on those things for them to make it official with the judge.
