{"id":95,"date":"2012-12-29T14:55:41","date_gmt":"2012-12-29T19:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2021-04-19T16:01:07","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T20:01:07","slug":"michigans-new-mediator-standards-of-conduct-approved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/michigans-new-mediator-standards-of-conduct-approved\/","title":{"rendered":"Michigan\u2019s New Mediator Standards of Conduct Approved"},"content":{"rendered":"

After three years and several iterations, the new Standards of Conduct for Mediators<\/a> have been approved by Michigan\u2019s State Court Administrator, and will go into effect February 1, 2013. I\u2019ve been involved with this project from the beginning, and it\u2019s been an interesting ride. I blogged about it in November 2011<\/a>, and again in May 2012<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Standards of Conduct for Mediators<\/a>, virtually identical to the ABA\/ACR\/AAA model standards, which do not address family mediation issues. Florida\u2019s standards<\/a> address the spectrum of mediation, but, as they\u00a0have not been revised since 2000, they do not reflect revisions to model standards.<\/p>\n

The most obvious change from the previous version circulated a year ago\u2014 and from Michigan\u2019s current standards, and from the Model Standards, on which Michigan\u2019s are based — is that this set contains an additional category, simply entitled, \u201cSafety.\u201d We tried to follow the category headings used in the civil Model Standards, but the standard entitled, \u201cQuality of the Process\u201d 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 \u201cSafety\u201d 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\u2019s familiarity with the federal d.v. statute allowed us to incorporate some of its language into this standard\u2014another ground-breaking feature of these Standards of Conduct.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The four of us who comprised the sub-committee that worked most closely on these Standards\u2014Zena Zumeta, Susan Butterwick, Barbara Johannessen and I\u2014will be presenting on these Standards at the ABA\u2019s Section on Dispute Resolution Annual Conference<\/a> in Chicago this spring. We\u2019re interested to hear others\u2019 reactions to this new approach to Standards of Conduct for Mediators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After three years and several iterations, the new Standards of Conduct for Mediators have been approved by Michigan\u2019s State Court Administrator, and will go into effect February 1, 2013. I\u2019ve been involved with this project from the beginning, and it\u2019s been an interesting ride. I blogged about it in November 2011, and again in May […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learnings-from-mediation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}