It’s Important to Be Honest in Divorce Mediation

Divorce mediation is an effective alternative to litigation, but only for couples who are willing to negotiate in good faith. Participants in mediation must agree to treat each other with respect. While this primarily means speaking and listening respectfully, it also means being honest and forthcoming as you go through the process of negotiating your divorce issues.

This honesty is important for the following reasons:

• It’s required by law: The law requires parties to a divorce to fully disclose all information about finances and assets. If you attempt to conceal assets or financial information, you could run into legal trouble that could result in fines or, at the very least, a worse outcome in your divorce.
• It’s part of a good-faith negotiation: Your ability to carry out divorce negotiations with your spouse will be severely hampered if you are dishonest in the process. If you get caught misleading your spouse, they will be significantly less likely to want to work with you moving forward. As such, the divorce could become much more confrontational, expensive and drawn out.
• It helps keep things running smoothly: Beyond what your dishonesty could do to the shared trust that must exist for a successful mediation, it could also simply make the process take longer. If you are caught lying, you’ll have to go back through the discovery process and produce all the documentation you would have had to do initially anyway, which will interrupt your negotiations.

For more advice about how to get the most out of divorce mediation, contact an experienced Long Island divorce lawyer at Solutions Divorce Mediation.