Why Is Mediation Mandatory In Texas?

Hey folks, Mark Scroggins with Scroggins law group wanted to remind y’all when I’m answering these questions that that y’all have posed, remember that that does not create an attorney client relationship between either myself or Scroggins Law Group and anyone out there. So this is just providing some general thoughts on the questions that y’all pose. Why is mediation mandatory in a divorce matter? Well, it’s not actually mandatory, okay. But what it does is it limits your ability to put your case on, if you refuse to go to mediation, and they will typically limit you to one hour per side. Now, if you’ve got a super, super simple divorce case, maybe an hour per side is just fine. Okay. But if you’ve got complex property issues that are looking to be divided, or if you have a child custody litigation, going on where both of y’all want to be primary, or one wants to be so managing conservator of the kids, you know, it’s gonna get pretty complex. And you sure as hell cannot put that case on in a period of an hour. So the courts tried to force everybody to go to mediation to try to clear their docket to the extent they can, because if every case went to trial, we’d be trying cases from 10 years ago than just from 18 months ago. All right. The courts are bogged down, we actually need more courts. But where does the money come from that comes from the taxpayer? All right, so you got to take money from somewhere to pay for more courts. So that’s what happens. So is mediation mandatory? No. Do you have to do it? If you’ve got any kind of complexity in your case? You sure as hell do. Unless you don’t want to have adequate time to actually put your case on now? Why does the court do it? They do it to try to clean their dockets as much as they can. Does that mean you can’t go to trial? No, absolutely. It does not. It means you can’t go to trial. It just is going to depend on what court in what county you are in as to how long it’s going to take to actually get to trial.