The Family Law Act encourages parties to use the Family Courts only as a last resort to resolve their disputes.
The Family Court prescribes that legal representatives must advise you about alternate dispute resolution services such as mediation, family counselling, family dispute resolution, conciliation, arbitration and family counselling before you make an application to the court for resolution of your family law matter/s.
Furthermore, except in some cases involving violence or threats of violence, parties must attend family dispute resolution before lodging an application with the court seeking to resolve a children’s matter. The courts also have the power to order parties to attend mediation or other alternate dispute resolution even once an application has been lodged.
Not only is mediation significantly less expensive than court action, experience has shown that where the parties are able to come to agreement between themselves rather than rely on the imposition of orders by the court, they are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome and adhere to the agreement.
How can Prime Lawyers help?
Prime Lawyers aims to assist you to achieve a satisfying result in your family law matter through assisting your negotiations with your ex-partner. However, we realise that for some people, negotiation is not what is needed to achieve a just, fair and acceptable result.
We are able to arrange and assist you to prepare and attend alternative dispute resolution services in order to quickly and economically achieve settlement of your family law issue. In addition we have experience in arranging, preparing for and attending mediation sessions for and with you, an approach that has proven to be very successful at achieving top results for our clients.
Please contact us on (02) 9521 2222 to speak with a family lawyer today. You can also send through your enquiry online now and we will contact you shortly.