After three years and several iterations, the new Standards of Conduct for Mediators have been approved by Michigan’s State Court Administrator, and will go into effect February 1, 2013. I’ve been involved with this project from the beginning, and it’s been an interesting ride. I blogged about it in November 2011, and again in May 2012.

What may be unique about these Standards is that they are designed intentionally to address all types of mediation, from general civil to domestic relations to probate. The model standards of conduct promoted by national organizations apply either to general civil mediations, or to domestic relations mediations, so we attempted to merge them into one set. Other state standards tend to lean towards one side or the other (see, e.g., Maryland’s Standards of Conduct for Mediators, virtually identical to the ABA/ACR/AAA model standards, which do not address family mediation issues. Florida’s standards address the spectrum of mediation, but, as they have not been revised since 2000, they do not reflect revisions to model standards.

The most obvious change from the previous version circulated a year ago— and from Michigan’s current standards, and from the Model Standards, on which Michigan’s are based — is that this set contains an additional category, simply entitled, “Safety.” We tried to follow the category headings used in the civil Model Standards, but the standard entitled, “Quality of the Process” became too unwieldy. So we created a new category to contain principles applying to mediations where the safety of a party, or of a person affected by the mediation, could be a concern. The “Safety” category will apply typically to domestic relations mediations, but could also come into play in guardianship and other family mediations. As we worked on this Standard, I learned a lot from fellow committee member Mary Lovik, who works for the DHS and is an expert on the problem of domestic violence. Mary’s familiarity with the federal d.v. statute allowed us to incorporate some of its language into this standard—another ground-breaking feature of these Standards of Conduct.

Substantively, these standards do not depart significantly from the current Standards. They provide more specific guidance to the wide array of problems that can arise in the course of mediation, and they coordinate with other state mediation resources, such as the new court rule on Confidentiality, MCR 2.412, and the Domestic Violence Screening Protocol.

The four of us who comprised the sub-committee that worked most closely on these Standards—Zena Zumeta, Susan Butterwick, Barbara Johannessen and I—will be presenting on these Standards at the ABA’s Section on Dispute Resolution Annual Conference in Chicago this spring. We’re interested to hear others’ reactions to this new approach to Standards of Conduct for Mediators.