The Interdisciplinary Settlement Conference: A Grassroots Alternative for Resolving High‐Conflict Parenting Disputes in Lean Times

• Author: Beverly Wood,Verna A. Adams,Stephen H. Sulmeyer
• Published date: 01 October 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12183
• Date: 01 October 2015

THE INTERDISCIPLINARY SETTLEMENT CONFERENCE: A

GRASSROOTS ALTERNATIVE FOR RESOLVING HIGH-CONFLICT

PARENTING DISPUTES IN LEAN TIMES

Stephen H. Sulmeyer, Hon. Verna A. Adams, and Hon. Beverly Wood

This article describes a court-connected alternative dispute resolution program, the Interdisciplinary Settlement Confer-

ence. The key feature of this program is the participation of two volunteer panelists, one a family law attorney and the

other a mental health professional experienced in parenting dispu tes, who assist the judicial officer in working with the par-

ties and their attorneys (if any) to reach a resolution of their parenting dispute. Significantly,inadditiontoaddressingthe

parties’ legal issues, the panelists also address the parties’ psychological and emotional issues relevant to the dispute o n an

as-needed basis. Findings from six years of experiencewith the program are discussed, including evidence of high satisfac-

tion with the program, a high rate of settlement, a decrease in relitigation, and a concomitant savings of scarce judicial

resources.

Keywords: Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR); Court-Connected ADR; Family Courts; Family Law; Interdisciplinary

Dispute Resolution; and Settlement Conferences.

I. INTRODUCTION

As has frequently been discussed in these pages, our legal system currently finds itself in the midst

of a paradigm shift regarding the adjudication of child custody/parenting disputes.

1

At the heart of

this fundamental rethinking of basic assumptions is the recognition of the limitations of the tradi-

tional adversary system to address the needs of separating families and the emergence of innovative

dispute resolution programs.

2

In keeping with this trend, a committee of stakeholders in Marin

County, California, met in June 2007 and implemented the Interdisciplinary Settlement Conference

(ISC) program, a judicial proceeding in which a volunteer mental health professional (MHP) and a

volunteer family law attorney work together with a judicial officer to help separating and separated

parents to resolve their parenting dispute.

What distinguishes the ISC from other interdisciplinary approaches to the resolution of such dis-

putes is the way in which it attempts to harmonize the complementary skill sets of judges, attorneys,

and MHPs. Unlike most interdisciplinary, court-connected alternative dispute resolution (ADR)

modalities, in which the MHP and/or lawyer are typically ancillary to and often disconnected from

the judicial process,

3

in the ISC the judge, MHP, and lawyer function as an integrated team. More-

over, in the ISC the MHP-panelist is encouraged to use the full range of his/her clinical skills as

needed to help the parties recognize and work constructively with the psychological and emotional

dynamics that underlie the putative dispute that is the subject of the formal motion before the court.

By inclusively addressing the parties’ legal and psychological issues, the ISC team more often than

not is able to defuse the parties’ hostility and help them to shift their focus from blaming each other

to attending to the needs of their children in a more objective, open, and dispassionate way. The pro-

gram has been very successful in terms of overall settlement rates, party satisfaction with the process,

reduction in interparty acrimony, deeper buy-in to agreements that are reached, lowered relitigation

rates, and conservation of scarce judicial resources.

4

Correspondence: steve@stevesulmeyer.com

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 53 No. 4, October 2015 632–649

V

C2015 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

II. BACKGROUND

Most American jurisdictions face the twin trends of increasing numbers of self-represented liti-

gants as well as reductions in judicial resources and decreasing affordability of private resources to

assist families going through divorce.

5

This challenge is exacerbated by dockets disproportionately

clogged by the “frequent fliers” who come to court regularly to litigate custody, both pre- and postde-

cree. Given these burgeoning problems, and the manifest benefits of alternatives to traditional litiga-

tion for handling family disputes,

6

the lead author in the spring of 2007 approached the supervising

judge of the Marin County Superior Court’s family law department, Hon. Verna A. Adams, and sug-

gested that at custody settlement conferences the presiding judicial officer be assisted by two volun-

teer settlement specialists, one of whom would be a MHP with experience in family, especially

parenting matters, the other an experienced family law attorney. Judge Adams greeted the sugges-

tion with enthusiasm and in June 2007 appointed the court’s Family Interdisciplinary Committee

(FIC), consisting of key stakeholders among local lawyers, mediators, and MHPs, all with extensive

experience in the area of child custody disputes, to flesh out the idea and implement a suitable pro-

gram.

7

Given budgetary realities, the committee decided to create a pilot program that was based

entirely on the pro bono contributions of its panelists. Lacking the wherewithal to engage in serious

evidence-based research (such as randomized controlled trials) prior to the creation and implementa-

tion of the program, a broad-contours approach was used with the intention to fine-tune as we went

along, and reassess after one year. The results after the one-year pilot stage were so overwhelmingly

positive that the court decided to implement the program on a permanent basis. This included further

invitations to qualified MHPs and attorneys, new local rules and forms, and additions to the court’s

web site. The FIC continued to meet monthly, and the FIC along with the judicial officers and the

ISC panelists meet annually, to discuss and make improvements to the program, which is now a reg-

ular feature of custody/parenting litigation in Marin County.

III. ASSUMPTIONS AND GOALS

In creating the ISC program we proceeded from three core assumptions and related goals

8

:

Assumption # 1: Adversarial litigation is ill suited for resolving most parenting disputes.

9

This is

a point about which there is little disagreement today.

10

One aspect of the adversary system’s inad-

equacies stood out for us, however: the tendency of the legal system to end the litigation but not

resolve the underlying problem—which can then fester and grow until its next eruption and the next

visit to court. Our goal was to create an approach that would understand the parties’ custody dispute

as a complex dynamic of human relationships

11

and attempt to resolve the conflict “holistically in an

effort to resolve the entire conflict and not simply its particular instantiation ... at a given point in

time.”

12

Assumption # 2: An effective alternative to adversarial litigation in family law must meaningfully

address the parties’ psychological and emotional issues that are typically entangled with their legal

positions. We believed that the effective alternative we were seeking needed to include in the dispute

resolution process the parties’ subjective experience of the dispute as well as the objective legal con-

text in which such experience is played out.

13

Our goal, therefore, was to create a program that views

divorce not primarily as a legal event, but rather as an ongoing social and emotional process of

restructuring the family that has significant financial, legal, and psychological aspects.

14

When char-

acterized in this way, parenting disputes call for “interventions that are collaborative, holistic, and

interdisciplinary, because these are the types of interventions most likely to address the families’

underlying dysfunction and emotional needs.”

15

Assumption # 3: An interdisciplinary approach to resolving parenting disputes, and corresponding

change in mindset, is the bestmeans to address holistically the legal, psychological, and emotional fac-

ets of such disputes. We assumed that an interdisciplinary team consisting of a lawyer and a MHP

Sulmeyer, Adams and Wood/THE INTERDISCIPLINARY SETTLEMENT CONFERENCE 633