Counsel prepare carefully for mediation: the statement, the exhibits, the negotiation strategy. The person who most often arrives unprepared is the client. Not for lack of diligence, but because nobody told them what the day would actually be like.

Here is what I wish every client heard from their lawyer the week before.

The morning will feel slow, and it may feel discouraging. Positions get stated, old grievances get aired, and the first numbers exchanged will strike your client as somewhere between disappointing and offensive. Tell them now: that is not the negotiation failing. That is the negotiation starting. In these cases, the real movement almost always comes late, after the room has done its slower work.

Much of the day happens in private session, and what your client tells me there stays there unless they authorize me to share it. That confidence is not a courtesy; in nearly every jurisdiction it is the law. It exists so your client can tell me the true bottom line, the fear they will not say in front of their sibling, the outcome they could actually live with. The clients who use the caucus honestly get far more from the day than the ones who negotiate with their own mediator.

At some point I will likely sit across from your client and tell them things they will not enjoy hearing about their case: where it is weak, what a court might do with it, what the fight is costing against what it might recover. Tell them in advance that this is the service, not a betrayal. I spent ten years deciding cases like theirs, and a candid private assessment from the neutral is one of the most valuable things the day produces. It lands better when the client was told to expect it.

The most useful hour of preparation is the one spent on net numbers: what does your client actually take home under each outcome, after fees, after costs, after the estate pays what the estate pays? A client who has seen that arithmetic negotiates from judgment. A client who first confronts it at four in the afternoon negotiates from shock.

Decide before the session who can say yes, and to what. If your client needs a spouse, a co-trustee, or a family consensus to commit, that person belongs in the building or continuously available. Deals have died overnight that were alive at eight in the evening. It is one of the most common structural causes of a failed mediation, and one of the easiest to prevent.

In an estate or trust dispute your client will spend a full day in proximity to the people and the history that produced the fight. They may hear a version of their family’s story they find unrecognizable. Tell them their job is not to correct the record. Their job is to make good decisions in the caucus. There is real relief on the other side of that discipline.

These matters settle in the late hours, when the grievances have been spent and what remains is the decision. The clients who commit to the whole day, and into the evening if the progress warrants it, give themselves the best chance the process offers.

None of this is complicated. Most of it takes one conversation. But that conversation, held the week before, does more for the outcome than anything that happens in the first three hours of the session.

The mediation is largely won or lost before anyone sits down at the table.