Also see: “Reflections on APFM’s Keynote: The Evolution of Family Mediation” with Susan Guthrie and “The Future of Family Mediation: The Rise of AI” with Colin Rule.
What follows are the PowerPoint Slides that I have developed for March 12, 2025’s APFM Featured Panel Presentation also with Susan Guthrie and Colin Rule.
My assignment is to discuss the growth of family mediation over the past 40 years, particularly how technology has dramatically changed the nature of family mediation practice.
My main message is that, over the last 40 years, family mediation has moved from being nearly 100% “physical” to being nearly 100% digital.
Technology has been at the heart of mediation’s growth and change. Perhaps the first notable technology that supported the growth of the mediation industry is the typewriter (along with paper and white out of course). Typewriters supported the development of written agreements that could be signed. No small thing for mediation.
A number of game changing developments have followed, including memory typewriters, the development of the dedicated word processor, the development of the PC and Mac, and ever improving software to run on our personal computers. Before long, email, the world wide web, the cloud, mobility and personalized communications all greatly supported the growth of mediation.
The biggest change has been the steady and accelerating move toward fully personalized digital communications. As I like to say, we are now in everybody’s pocket or purse.
While the past 40 years have transformed mediation from being in-person, physical and reliant on the postal service , many things do remain the same. “People are still people.” They will not reach agreement without first reasoning that doing so is, in fact, a good decision for them in their life. The most important technology of all remains the mediators ability to develop a rapport relationship with each mediation participant.
AI does, however, now change everything! All of our previous technical advances made mediation communications faster and more capable, but these advances did not speak directly to the substantive issues of a dispute. That is now changing. AI is perfectly pleased, willing and ready to weigh in on all of the substantive issues of family and divorce mediation. The key is that we know how to constructively harness AI’s vast reach and knowledge base.
This is where a very cool phenomenon deserves to be noticed, which is that both mediation and AI are fully dependent upon the questions that are asked, be those questions being asked to participants or one or more AI wizards. In the world of AI technology, questioning is called “prompting.” The quality of our answer greatly depends on the specific questions asked.
For example, one option is to ask an AI wizard for “the best single answer.” Doing so will, however, almost always result in one party liking that suggestion better than the other, and the other may fully lose confidence in consulting AI. If, however, we never ask AI for a single answer, but always ask for 2 or more solutions that might work for our parties, we not only get more good ideas, but also a helpful space within which parties can further their negotiation dialogue.
So, the big deal with AI, in my humble opinion, is that AI is pleased to join our mediation conversation discussing all of the substantive issues of divorce and family mediation – not just support us in communicating faster, better and cheaper. Parties will be bringing AI perspectives with them to a mediation and we had better be prepared to meet them where they respectively are. Most critically, let’s all use AI as an idea generator far more than a decider. If we do this, our mediation participants and we as mediators will be empowered to mediate ever more informed understandings.
Here is the PDF of my PowerPoint to kick off APFM’s Mediation Past, Present & Future and our evolution from physical to digital mediation
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