It is seven in the evening. The gap has closed, the last concession has been made, and the rooms are shaking hands. Everyone is tired, and someone suggests that the lawyers can “paper it next week.”

This is the most dangerous sentence in mediation.

An agreement in principle that leaves the building unsigned begins dying in the parking lot. The client replays the day for a spouse who was not there and hears how it sounds out loud. A sibling calls. Buyer’s remorse, which is not dishonesty but human nature, goes to work overnight on every term that was painful to give. By Friday, “we agreed” has become “we were discussing,” and the mediation that succeeded at seven has failed by the weekend, with all the hardening of positions that failure brings.

So the last hour of a successful mediation is drafting hour, and I hold the room for it. Tired people write short documents, which is fine. The term sheet does not need elegance. It needs completeness on the points that kill deals, and in estate and trust settlements those points are knowable in advance.

Because they are knowable, I do that work early. Before the day, counsel on both sides receive from me a checklist of provisions to consider when drafting a settlement agreement or term sheet in their matter, drawn from the pleadings and the exchanged record. It is not a draft and it is not legal advice; the drafting belongs to the lawyers. It is a map, so that the last hour is spent filling in terms rather than remembering what the terms need to be.

Estate parties wear multiple hats: individually, as personal representative, as trustee, as parent of minor beneficiaries. The term sheet should say which hats are at the table, because a settlement signed in one capacity and attacked in another is not finished.

The releases are the product being purchased. Do they cover the administration to date, the accounting, the claims pleaded, the claims that could have been pleaded? Mutual or one-way? A single sentence of vagueness here funds the next lawsuit.

Amounts, sources, and timing, and in an estate case the source matters as much as the amount: paid by the estate, by the trust, by an individual, or by an insurer. The parties need not resolve every question at nine at night, but each side should consider the tax consequences of the settlement with its own adviser before signing, or that question will reopen the deal in February.

Accountings approved or waived with informed consent. The fiduciary’s fees resolved. Successor trustees named if the relationship is ending. Court approvals identified where the law requires them, and in probate matters it often does: minors, unborn beneficiaries, guardians ad litem, or the court’s blessing of the compromise itself. A term sheet that ignores the approval step has not shortened the case; it has hidden the last act.

Confidentiality of the terms, if the parties want it, stated now rather than negotiated later. What happens to the pending litigation, and when. And a sentence I consider essential: that this term sheet is intended to be a binding settlement agreement, enforceable according to its terms, with the formal documents to follow as implementation rather than as a second negotiation.

The parties, not just the lawyers. There is something almost ceremonial about it at the end of a long day, and the ceremony is doing legal and psychological work at the same time: what is signed at the table tends to stay settled, because everyone participated in its making and no one can later say they never agreed.

None of this is a substitute for the careful settlement documents counsel will prepare in the weeks that follow, and nothing here is legal advice for any particular matter; the drafting belongs to the parties’ lawyers, as it should. But the difference between a mediation that ended a dispute and one that merely paused it is usually written, or not written, in that last tired hour.

Stay for it. Sign before you leave.

The handshake is the beginning of the agreement, not the end of it.