Ask most litigators when a case should mediate and the honest answer is: after discovery closes, when both sides finally know what they have. It is a reasonable instinct. It is also, in estate and trust litigation, usually a costly one.

Here is what the calendar actually does while everyone waits to be fully informed.

The fees run. Not just your client’s fees: in a contested estate, several sets of counsel are often billing at once, and much of it is ultimately paid from the very property the family is fighting over. By the time the case is “ready” to mediate, a meaningful piece of what the parties were fighting for has already gone to the fight.

The positions harden. A family dispute in its first months is still a family dispute. A family dispute after two years of motion practice is a war with a history, and the history itself becomes something to be avenged. Every deposition, every accusatory brief, every discovery skirmish adds a wound that the mediator must later spend hours helping the parties set aside.

And discovery, in these cases, is not a neutral fact-finding exercise. It is siblings deposing siblings. It is a daughter’s text messages read aloud by opposing counsel. Some of the most productive information in the case file comes at a price no spreadsheet captures.

Earlier than the eve of trial, and usually earlier than counsel first assumes. The real test is not whether discovery is complete. It is whether the parties know enough to negotiate responsibly: the instruments, the accountings, the asset values, and the few facts on which the dispute genuinely turns. In most estate and trust matters that is a manageable list, and cooperating counsel can assemble it by agreement in a fraction of the time formal discovery takes. That exchange of essential information is the whole premise of Early Dispute Resolution, which I have written about separately, but the principle applies to ordinary mediation as well: gather what the negotiation needs, not everything the trial might.

There are cases that should wait. A genuine capacity or undue-influence question may need medical records and the testimony that goes with them. A business may need a real valuation before anyone can negotiate its division. When the missing information would change the negotiation itself, get it first. But get it deliberately, by the shortest route available, with the mediation date already on the calendar pulling the schedule forward.

That last point matters more than it sounds. A mediation date changes behavior. Exchanges that would drift for months get completed, because everyone is preparing for the same day. Clients begin thinking about outcomes instead of grievances. The date does quiet work long before anyone sits down.

What I suggest to counsel is simple: pick the earliest date by which the parties can be responsibly informed, not the latest date the scheduling order allows. Those are very different days, and the distance between them is usually measured in fees the estate never needed to spend and damage the family never needed to absorb.

No one can promise that an early mediation resolves the matter. But the arithmetic of waiting is rarely in the family’s favor.

The settlement reached on the courthouse steps almost always could have been reached sooner, cheaper, and with more of the family intact.