Most North Texas family cases reach mediation before they ever reach a courtroom. What you sign there can bind you the day you sign it. Our seat is on your side of the table, and we get you ready before you take yours.
Mediation is a structured settlement negotiation run by a neutral mediator who facilitates the deal but decides nothing: the parties keep all decision-making authority. Texas courts commonly refer divorce and custody cases to mediation under Texas Family Code § 6.602 and § 153.0071, and a mediated settlement agreement that meets the statute's requirements is binding and, with narrow exceptions, cannot be revoked.
In a suit affecting the parent-child relationship, the court may send the parties to mediation on their written agreement, or on the court's own motion. Nobody has to agree. In contested North Texas custody cases, referral before a final hearing is common practice.
The same authority exists in a suit for dissolution of a marriage: referral on the parties' agreement or the court's own motion, with the same binding force for a qualifying mediated settlement agreement.
A mediated settlement agreement is binding if it carries a prominently displayed statement (boldfaced, capitalized, or underlined) that it is not subject to revocation, and is signed by each party and by each party's attorney present at the signing. Meet those requirements, and a party is entitled to judgment on it.
A party may file a written objection to a mediation referral based on family violence. Once filed, the case may not be referred unless the court holds a hearing and finds the objection unsupported. And if it is referred, the court must order safety measures, including separate rooms and no face-to-face contact.
The Collaborative Family Law Act builds a voluntary, contract-based settlement process. No court can order it over a party's objection. And if the process fails, the collaborative lawyers are disqualified from taking the matter to trial.
Whether mediation is ordered, and when, is largely a county-level matter. Some North Texas courts order mediation before a final hearing can be set; others encourage it case by case. Where your case sits shapes the sequence.
Property, support, and the terms of the decree negotiated in one structured session. The mediated settlement agreement can resolve the whole case, or the part of it that is ready.
We handle this when your divorce is headed to mediation, ordered or agreed. See divorce and property division.
Conservatorship, possession, and decision rights negotiated under § 153.0071. The vocabulary is Texas-specific, and so is the binding force of what you sign.
We handle this when a custody dispute reaches the table, inside a divorce or a standalone SAPCR. See child custody.
An existing order being renegotiated after circumstances changed. The prior order is the baseline, which changes the leverage on both sides of the table.
We handle this when a modification suit is referred to mediation. See modifications.
The order is signed, the mediator is booked, and the date is set. Preparation now runs on the court's clock, not yours.
We handle this when you already have a mediation date and need to arrive ready.
A Chapter 15 process: both spouses sign a participation agreement, retain collaborative counsel, and work the case in structured meetings instead of hearings.
We handle this when both spouses are committed to settling and want more structure than a one-day session.
The agreement itself: drafted tightly, read completely, and signed only when the terms say what you think they say. There is no unsigning it later.
We handle this when terms are coming together and the paper has to be right the first time.
Before the session we work the file: the pleadings, the inventory, the proposed schedules, and the other side's stated positions. Preparation is most of what mediation rewards.
You arrive knowing your realistic range on every issue, what you can trade, and where you walk away. Whoever must approve a deal is present or reachable: decision authority at the table is a condition of a productive day.
Most Texas family mediations run in separate rooms, with the mediator shuttling offers between them. We frame each proposal, test each counter against the trial alternative, and keep the numbers honest.
If terms come together, the agreement is usually drafted the same day. We review every line before you sign, because a qualifying MSA under § 153.0071 is binding the moment the signatures land.
A qualifying MSA entitles a party to judgment on its terms. If issues remain, the case goes forward smaller, with the record and the preparation already built.
Mediation is the one day in a Texas family case when nobody in the building can rule against you. The mediator, a neutral both sides select and share, runs the negotiation: carrying offers between rooms, testing weak positions in private, hunting for the overlap between what each side can live with. What the mediator cannot do is decide. No finding, no ruling, no order. Every term that ends up in the agreement is a term one side proposed and both sides accepted.
What the mediator cannot do is decide. No finding, no ruling, no order.
That structure is why mediation works, and why it deserves to be taken seriously. In court, a judge who misreads your case can be appealed. At mediation, the only protection you have is the quality of your preparation and the judgment of the people on your side of the table.
One role distinction is worth being precise about, because the day goes badly for people who miss it. The mediator is not your lawyer. The neutral cannot advise you, cannot tell you the offer on the table is worse than your trial position, and cannot flag the paragraph in the draft that quietly trades away your enforcement remedy. That is advocacy, and it is a separate seat. Ours. We do not act as the neutral in our clients’ cases: our work is preparing you for the session, advocating for you through it, and drafting or vetting what you sign at the end of it.
Because nothing is imposed, people sometimes treat mediation casually, as a conversation they can walk back later. The catch is in the paper. If the session ends in a mediated settlement agreement that meets the Texas Family Code’s requirements, that agreement is binding and, as a rule, cannot be revoked. The most consequential document in many Texas family cases is signed not in a courtroom but in a conference room, at the end of a long day. More on that below: it is the single most important consumer fact on this page.
Because nothing is imposed, people sometimes treat mediation casually, as a conversation they can walk back later.
Two statutes put mediation inside nearly every litigation path. In a suit affecting the parent-child relationship, Texas Family Code § 153.0071 lets the court refer the case to mediation on the parties’ written agreement, or on the court’s own motion. § 6.602 gives the court the same power over a suit for dissolution of a marriage. Agreement is not required. Yours or anyone’s.
How that power gets used is a county-by-county matter. There is no statewide rule that every family case must mediate; there are local standing orders and each court’s own practice, and in North Texas they lean heavily toward mediation: some counties order it before a final contested hearing can be set, others strongly encourage it case by case. Where your case sits determines the sequence, which is one reason the county is among the first questions we ask.
The other reason cases mediate is that the parties want them to. Trial is public; mediation is private, and Texas ADR law, Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 154.073, makes what is said in the session confidential and inadmissible against you later. Trial hands the schedule and the outcome to a stranger’s read of a cold record; mediation leaves both in the parties’ hands. A day of structured negotiation also costs a fraction of a contested final hearing. Many cases do resolve at or shortly after mediation, not because anyone forces a deal, but because it is often the first moment both sides sit with real numbers, real calendars, and a neutral telling each room, privately, what a judge is likely to make of its best arguments.
Offers move room to room, and each one carries a little information about what the other side actually values, which is often different from what their pleadings said.
Most Texas family mediations are caucus-style: you and your attorney in one room, the other side in another, the mediator moving between them. Some mediators open with a brief joint session; many skip it, particularly where the temperature is high. Offers move room to room, and each one carries a little information about what the other side actually values, which is often different from what their pleadings said.
Expect the morning to feel slow and the afternoon to move. Early rounds are positioning. The real trades tend to surface later in the day, after both rooms have absorbed the mediator’s private read on their weak points and the session’s end time starts doing its work.
Preparation is most of it, and it happens before the day: the inventory reconciled, the support numbers run, the possession calendar priced in real terms (school runs, holidays, summers), and a written range on every issue: open here, happy here, walk here. Mediation rewards realistic ranges, and realistic ranges come from knowing what the statute and the local bench would likely do with your facts, then negotiating in that shadow. If a premarital agreement already governs part of the estate, the range narrows before you arrive. If the estate has valuation or tracing problems, we say so, and sequence the property work first.
During the session, the work is advocacy at conversational volume: framing each offer so it leads with what the other room values, testing each counter against the trial alternative, and catching the terms that sound generous but cost you enforcement later. Decision authority stays at the table: anyone whose sign-off a deal needs is present or reachable, because a mediation that ends with “let me check” is usually a mediation that has to be rebooked.
Expect the morning to feel slow and the afternoon to move. Early rounds are positioning.
The mediated settlement agreement is where Texas law departs from what most people assume about settlements. An ordinary settlement agreement can generally be revoked before the court renders judgment on it. A qualifying MSA cannot. Texas built it that way deliberately, so a hard-won deal cannot unravel on the drive home.
Under Texas Family Code § 153.0071(d), with matching language for divorce suits in § 6.602(b), a mediated settlement agreement is binding if it:
Meet those three, and a party is entitled to judgment on the agreement: the statute says so expressly, notwithstanding the ordinary rules that let parties back out of settlements before judgment. There is no cooling-off period. There is no revision window.
The reading happens before the signing, or it does not happen at all.
Texas gives courts one tightly drawn ground to decline judgment on a qualifying MSA in a child-related case. Under § 153.0071(e-1), a court may refuse to enter judgment only if it finds both that the agreement is not in the child’s best interest and that either a party was a victim of family violence whose ability to make decisions was impaired, or the agreement would place the child in the household of, or give unsupervised access to, a person with a registrable sex offense or a history of physical or sexual abuse. Read that provision as what it is: a safety valve for extreme facts, not a second chance at a deal you regret. Beyond it, challenges to MSAs are uphill and expensive. The consumer lesson does not change: understand every paragraph before you sign, because Texas intends to hold you to all of them.
Family violence changes the analysis first. Negotiation assumes two people who can bargain freely, and a history of violence or coercive control breaks that assumption. The statute accounts for it: under § 153.0071(f), a party may file a written objection to a mediation referral based on family violence committed by another party, and once the objection is filed the case may not be referred unless the court, after a hearing, finds the objection unsupported by a preponderance of the evidence. If the case is referred anyway, the court must order measures to protect the objecting party’s physical and emotional safety: the statute directs that the parties not be required to have face-to-face contact and that they be placed in separate rooms. Divorce suits carry a parallel objection under § 6.602. If this is your situation, raise it before any referral is agreed to and before any session is booked.
Incomplete information is the second disqualifier. An MSA signed before you know what the estate contains is binding anyway. If accounts have not been disclosed, a business has not been valued, or separate-property tracing is unresolved, the sequence is discovery first, mediation second. And saying so early is cheaper than litigating a bad agreement later.
An MSA signed before you know what the estate contains is binding anyway.
A table without authority is the third. If the other side arrives without the person who can actually approve a deal, or treats the session as a way to burn a fee and a deadline, a prepared attorney recognizes it early and protects the record and the clock.
Mediation is usually one long day inside a litigation track. Collaborative law replaces the track. Under Texas Family Code Chapter 15, the Collaborative Family Law Act, both spouses sign a participation agreement that identifies their collaborative lawyers, states the scope of the matter, and suspends court intervention while the process runs (§ 15.101). The case then moves through scheduled working sessions, commonly with jointly engaged neutral professionals (a financial neutral, a child-development professional) instead of two competing sets of hired witnesses.
Two features define the process. It is strictly voluntary: a court may not order a party into a collaborative process over that party’s objection (§ 15.102). And it is self-enforcing in an unusual way: if the process terminates without settlement, the collaborative lawyers, and their firms, are disqualified from representing the parties in the litigation that follows (§ 15.106). Everyone at the table, counsel included, is invested in settlement, because failure sends both sides out to hire new trial lawyers. A collaborative settlement agreement that carries the required prominently displayed irrevocability statement and signatures is, like an MSA, a document a party may take straight to judgment (§ 15.105). The Act also builds in family-violence screening before and during the process (§ 15.112).
Collaborative fits couples with genuine settlement intent, estates complicated enough to benefit from shared neutral professionals, and a premium on privacy. It fits badly where trust is gone, disclosure is doubtful, or one side wants leverage more than resolution. Those cases belong in the divorce litigation track, with mediation at the right moment inside it.
Collaborative fits couples with genuine settlement intent, estates complicated enough to benefit from shared neutral professionals, and a premium on privacy.
A partial MSA is still a binding MSA as to the issues it covers. Settle the property and try conservatorship; settle the schedule and try the support number. The remaining case is smaller, cheaper, and sharper, and the preparation is never wasted: the same file that made you formidable at mediation is the file that walks into the final hearing. Even a full impasse buys something real: you leave knowing the other side’s actual positions, which is worth more than everything their pleadings claimed.
Every mediation matter here starts the same way: a free, fifteen-minute Case Alignment Review with our intake team (your county, your timeline, whether mediation has been ordered or a date already set, and whether we are the right firm for the shape of your case). If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better suited. If your mediation date is close, say so at the start; preparation runs on the court’s calendar, and we sequence accordingly.
When the fit is right, the next step is the $275 Strategy Consultation: a working session where an attorney evaluates the file, gives your settlement ranges their first honest draft, and walks you through your rights and options, under attorney-client privilege. How retainers work is explained in plain terms here, and the cost estimator gives you a starting frame before anyone asks for a commitment.
One last practical note: mediation practice is local. Which courts order it, when they order it, and how the sequence runs varies across the twelve counties we file in: that local knowledge is part of what you are hiring. What the whole process looks like, start to finish, is mapped on what to expect.
A New York-trained litigator running a Texas family-law practice. Hundreds of North Texas family-law matters handled.
Runs intake for the firm. Before your alignment review, your timeline, your county, and the existing order are already in the file, so the fifteen minutes go to your question.
We handle mediation & collaborative law matters across the 12 North Texas counties. We know each docket.
English, Russian, and Ukrainian.
We file in Collin, Dallas, Denton, Tarrant, Rockwall, Kaufman, Ellis, Hunt, Grayson, Fannin, Wise, and Parker counties. We know each docket.
Every family-law case sits in front of a court whose standing orders, hearing rhythms, and docket preferences vary by county. Which court hears a temporary-orders motion the same week. Which one orders mediation before any contested hearing. That is the local part of practice that does not show up in the statute book.
We don't take every case.
Family law is a long relationship.
The wrong fit costs everyone.
Most cases here start with a fifteen-minute alignment review. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so on the call.
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