I am not an inexpensive mediator. Counsel know that when they call, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

So let me make the argument honestly, the way I would want it made to me: when a family’s estate or trust is in litigation, what does the mediator’s fee actually buy, and what is it measured against?

Start with what the dispute costs. Not the mediator. The dispute.

A contested estate or trust matter of real size rarely involves two lawyers. It involves two, three, sometimes five sets of counsel: one for the personal representative or trustee, one for each faction of beneficiaries, perhaps a guardian ad litem. Each of them bills monthly. Each of them must read the same instruments, take the same depositions, and answer the same motions. Add the experts: business valuation, forensic accounting, capacity, handwriting. Add the appellate lawyers if anyone dislikes the result, and in these cases someone usually does.

Now add the costs that never appear on an invoice. The family business that drifts for two years because no one has clear authority to direct it. The property that cannot be sold and the distributions that cannot be made while the estate is frozen. The discount that evaporates, the market that moves, the tax election whose deadline passes while the parties argue. In a large estate, the slow leak of a stalled administration can quietly outrun the legal fees themselves.

And then the costs that no accountant can reach. Depositions of siblings, taken by professionals whose job is to press. A public court file that anyone can read, in a family that has spent generations being careful. Holidays divided. A mother’s or father’s name attached, permanently, to a caption.

Against all of that stands the mediator’s fee: a single figure, agreed in advance, for one prepared day. In a matter of real size it is smaller than the cost of briefing a single contested motion. It is not a rounding error against the estate. It is a rounding error against the interest on the estate.

Cheap mediation and good mediation part company long before the session starts.

The fee buys preparation. Before the parties ever sit down, I have read the instruments, the accountings, the pleadings, and the correspondence, and I have spent time on the telephone with every lawyer in the case. The parties should walk into a room where the neutral already understands the case nearly as well as they do. That is what makes a single day productive instead of ceremonial.

It buys standing. Beneficiaries who believe they have been wronged, and fiduciaries who believe they have been slandered, do not move off their positions for a stranger. They move for someone whose read of the case they cannot dismiss. I spent ten years on the probate bench deciding exactly these disputes, and thirty years before that representing the people in them. When I tell a party privately how their theory is likely to fare, that assessment carries the weight of someone who has ruled on it. That candor, delivered in confidence, is often the hinge of the whole day.

It buys stamina and structure. These cases do not settle at eleven in the morning. They settle after the grievances have been aired, the arithmetic has been done, and the parties are finally tired of carrying the fight. A prepared mediator holds the room together for as long as that takes.

And a flat, all-inclusive fee buys alignment. The parties know, to the dollar and in advance, what the day costs. There is no meter running in the corner of the room, and no economic reason for the process to sprawl. My incentives point in exactly one direction: toward resolution.

Here is the comparison that matters, and it is not between an expensive mediator and an inexpensive one. It is between a mediation that resolves the matter and one that does not.

A failed mediation is never free, whatever the neutral charged. The parties spend the day, harden their positions, conclude that settlement is impossible, and return to the litigation with new conviction. The modest fee turns out to be the smallest part of its cost.

No mediator can promise a settlement, and you should be wary of one who implies otherwise. What preparation, experience, and a full committed day can honestly promise is this: the best chance the parties will ever have to end the matter on their own terms, while there is still something left to divide and someone left to speak to at Thanksgiving.

Families of means are sophisticated buyers. They do not choose the cheapest surgeon, the cheapest trustee, or the cheapest counsel, because they understand that in matters of consequence, the fee is not the cost. The outcome is the cost.

An estate worth fighting over is an estate worth resolving well. Measured against what is actually at stake, in money, in privacy, and in the family itself, the question is not whether a prepared neutral is expensive.

It is whether the family can afford anything less.