On Millennials Killing the Old-School Divorce Model…And Why It's a Good Thing

It’s September: summer’s over, the kids are back at school, the holidays are still a ways off, and turns out that spending 9 hours together at Just Like Heaven in 97-degree heat with no shade and $30 margaritas was not the marriage-saver after all. The Adults Are Talking, and they’re talking divorce. There’s a reason September is a prime month for new divorce petitions.

I know I’m committing a serious faux pas with this title. Lump them together all you want, but the only thing that truly unites millennials is their aversion to being lumped together.

But some of those infamous lists of what millennials have “killed,” you know, mayonnaise and Hooters and the like, have some truth to them. Let me add to that list the old-school style of getting divorced, wherein both spouses hire unsmiling lawyers in suits who bring the spouses into their unsmiling law firms to sit across from each other at a conference table while the lawyers fight about 401(k)s, summer homes, and who’s going to pay for Bobby’s braces, all at a combined $1000/hour for months on end (or, even better, where both of you get up at 5:30 AM to crawl on the 405 to downtown Los Angeles for your hearing at Stanley Mosk).

It’s way too early to tell if millennials will indeed kill that brand of divorce, but I think they should. And not just because they don’t have summer homes. Or possibly any homes to divide in a world where a 2-bedroom house costs well over a million dollars in many markets.

If you're a young-ish person contemplating divorce, it’s likely that, among your plethora of concerns, you’re afraid about what your divorce is going to look like. You don’t want your parents’ divorce, and you don’t want Marriage Story. Specifically, you don’t want a process that turns the person you married into the enemy (forever), you don’t want to unnecessarily fight about crap that will not matter 5 or 10 years from now, and you don’t want to lose your soul or your life savings in the process. Which is what a lot of the old-school divorce model is all about.

But you also don’t want to roll over and make stupid and irreversible mistakes in what could very well be the biggest financial and relational transaction of your life in finalizing your divorce. Which is what trying to DIY your divorce can easily turn into, especially if you’re not familiar with relevant laws and processes.

In my work as a California divorce attorney and mediator, I’ve typically found that people think the above are the only two options: 1) start paying uncertain and crushing amounts of money into an adversarial lawyer system where the business model rewards them for how long you and your spouse stay at war; or 2) fumble around on their own with forms they found on the internet and ChatGPT without knowledge of state divorce laws, and with a potential power imbalance or at least lack of highly functional communication in the marriage.

To believe those are the only two options is not absurd – I had the same thought when I got divorced in my early 30s, prior to my career in divorce law, and royally screwed up trying option 2 (minus the AI) only to end up in a really bad version of option 1. But that belief is also, fortunately for you, wrong.

My years in divorce law have primarily taught me one important thing: the vast majority of divorces do not need adversarial lawyers draining your accounts and your will to live. But many of them do need outside help. Which is why I have come to the belief that mediation should be the default divorce resolution process for most divorces. This is true for any generation, but even more so for a generation that understands that money and things are ultimately not as important as mental well-being, relationships, and enjoying the ultimate experience of a life well lived (sorry for the wellness speak, but it’s true).

The Most Valuable Three-Legged Race You’ll Ever Run

One way to think of divorce mediation is that it is a bit like a three-legged 400-meter race at the company retreat that you didn’t want to attend, where you’re paired with the person you like least at the office, but the prize is $10,000 apiece and you have no other competitors. All you have to do is finish. You and Chad are going to have to do it together, it may take longer than you think, and it’s probably going to be awkward and unpleasant and not something you’d ever want a commemorative photo of on social media. But the individual rewards to each of you are worth it, and all you have to do is finish together without quitting. And that $10,000 apiece reward is not too far off from what the savings are for a typical mediated vs. litigated divorce, and, in many cases, severely underestimating the savings.

To be clear, divorce mediation has been around for several decades now. But, honestly, it was not as popular or prevalent with prior generations for whom divorce was synonymous with war – cue Kramer v. Kramer or The War of the Roses or a thousand film noirs about private eyes getting the goods against someone’s spouse to nail them in court. You don’t really see divorce mediation in TV shows or movies. Why? Because it’s not all that dramatic. Things are resolved in a relatively casual, friendly, and efficient manner. The first few minutes of Marriage Story were in a mediator’s office, but they ditched that for the much more Oscar-baiting version of a couple tearing each other apart for two hours.

One takeaway here is that, if you’re trying to write a sellable screenplay about divorce, don’t write it about a divorce that is mediated. Another takeaway is that, if you want your own divorce to be not that dramatic, not that expensive, and not that long, try mediation and use your extra savings to, I don’t know, self-produce your own movie about your own mediated divorce that no one will want to see because it’s so undramatic and short.

The Boring, Informal Process of Mediation

All in all, mediation far more resembles a series of mostly relaxed but important work meetings than anything you’ve seen in the movies or TV about divorce lawyers or courts. When couples work with me, I give each person a little homework to have ready before the first session. I hand them both a series of questions to answer, which they can write out or just think through, including asking each of them to talk about the positive qualities of the other person and what they valued about them in the marriage (you may recall this also happening at the start of Marriage Story before they ditched the process to rip each other’s souls out). I find this genuinely helps both parties get into the mindset of remembering the good in the other person, which is part of reaching an amicable resolution. But it’s just as much for me: it helps me to understand the dynamics of the relationship so I can better guide them toward resolution. I also ask them to share, among other things, their goals, hopes, and concerns about the mediation process.

Which might seem like an obvious conversation for two divorcing people to have before they start paying anyone hundreds of dollars an hour, but I understand that communication is often weak, and sometimes nonexistent, by the time a couple reaches divorce. Just this conversation alone can be hugely helpful in getting the parties to lower their guards, hear each other, and start to understand what each of them actually wants out of the process, both legally and emotionally, so they can start running that three-legged race together. And again, it helps me figure out what I’m working with, so I can guide them toward their goals while staying conscious of the concerns and the pitfalls.

Then I’ll go over the general process of what needs to happen to get this done, which boils down to:

1. A petition (and possibly a response) needs to be filed.

2. Both parties need to complete their financial disclosures.

3. Both parties should request any information and documents from the other that they reasonably think they need to reach a deal.

4. Through the mediation sessions, we reach agreements on any and all issues that need resolving, including property and debt distribution, child custody, child support, and spousal support.

5. Then I, or one of the parties’ lawyers, write up a marital settlement agreement, which gets edited as needed and ultimately signed by both parties and entered by the court.

The rest of the process is subsequent zoom meetings to go through the steps of that process, most of which is making sure all the necessary information has been shared and talking through compromises on the disputed issues. And when the agreement on these issues is written up and entered by the court, it’s D-O-N-E, without you ever getting to wonder whether that’s the smell of Bengay or Dewar’s emanating from your lawyer’s general direction as you wait for your case to be called all morning in department L62 (as your $500/hour meter keeps running), while you ponder whether your boss is going to start to suspect you’re not actually at the doctor’s office for the fifth time this month.

Cool Story, Bro, But How Much Does This Cost?

The 21st century is all about the “gotcha” economy. You’re led to believe there’s one price, but it’s actually another, and it’s on you to check your credit card statement, compare it to whatever 23-page contract you were forced to sign on a pop-up screen before ordering that burrito, and then spend an hour fighting with a chatbot before giving up and letting the terrorists win. And, at this point, it’s just accepted that that’s how business works.

With a litigated divorce, all bets are off when it comes to the question of “how much is this all going to cost?” That $5,000 or $10,000 retainer you (each) pay at the start is just an advance on costs, not the whole bill. You’ll (both) be charged in six-minute increments for every email, letter, call, form, pleading, and even the drive-time for your lawyer to get to the courthouse, as well as all the hours your lawyer sits there waiting for your case to be called. Think tens of thousands of dollars apiece, even when no trial actually happens and you just settle. And any person in the process — you, your spouse, or either of your lawyers — can gunk up the process to make it last exponentially longer than it should. Add to that the costs of missing work, stress, and loss of bandwidth and well-being that an adversarial divorce can bring. Most people I know don’t have the money or appetite for all that.

Mediation isn’t free but it’s a world of difference in cost from the alternative. Many people end up paying for just one professional (the mediator) to oversee the negotiation and handle all the paperwork, all in pursuit of agreement, as compared to paying two attorneys who may be in pursuit of the opposite of agreement. Even where the divorcing spouses choose to retain consulting attorneys to provide legal advice throughout the mediation process, this is generally a fraction of the cost of hiring an attorney of record to oversee the divorce. A number of mediators, including myself, offer flat-fee mediations which provides a single price upfront for the process (I offer packages at $3000, $6500, and $8500, not including filing fees, as of the writing of this article). That said, whether a mediation is successful is ultimately in the hands of the two divorcing spouses with the mediator’s guidance, but most people in mediation have the desire and motivation to make it successful when the alternative is an expensive, uncertain, and draining process.

How Mediation Helps Avoid Power Imbalances and Ignorant Mistakes

Of course, mediation does cost more than just doing it yourself with the public forms and all the free resources that the interwebs provides. And if, between the two of you, you’ve got the mutual trust and resourcefulness to get it done in a fair manner, then more power to you.

The risk of the DIY divorce isn’t so much that you’ll fill out a form incorrectly (although that is a risk). The forms are annoying, but they’re easy to find, and there are various forms of free instructions out there. The bigger issue is that the forms don’t really tell you the law, and they don’t tell you how it applies to you. And googling how community property, custody, spousal support, and child support are determined in a place like California in the 2026 world of AI-slop is bound to result in more questions than correct answers. If none of those are at play in your divorce, then it may not matter, but it’s unlikely that they’re not, and you may not even have the information you need to realize whether and how they are at play when you do it yourself.

Separately, trying to have a “peaceful” DIY divorce can easily turn into you being taken advantage of, consciously or unconsciously, in ways that seem easier to go along with than fight in the moment, but which can haunt you for years. If you’re the kind of person who hates confrontation — and if the phrase “amicable divorce” appealed to you enough to read this far, there’s a decent chance you are — your response to a tense and possibly confusing conversation may just be to concede. Not because you’ve been persuaded, but because the discomfort is unbearable and agreeing makes it stop. That instinct can be a genuine asset in a marriage. It’s not so great in a divorce negotiation, especially a negotiation with the one person on earth who knows exactly which look makes you fold. And it doesn’t take a bully for this to go sideways. It just takes one person who’s a little better at arguing, or who has always been the one who handled the money, and one person who wants this to be over more than they want to be right.

The problem there, of course, is that deal you make in a tense afternoon doesn't expire when your mood lifts. You may be living with it for years or decades. A divorce mediator doesn’t advocate for either person, but what they can and should do is provide the legal information necessary for people to make informed decisions, and implement and oversee a process and atmosphere that is designed to foster mutually beneficial outcomes and avoid imbalance and duress.

And if you want more protection than a neutral can give you, you should have it. Plenty of people in mediation hire a consulting attorney — their own lawyer, on their own time, on a limited-scope basis — to review the agreement before signing and to talk through specific issues between sessions, or even attend sessions, all while remaining in the constructive process of mediation.

It should be noted that mediation is not the right process for every couple. Where there's been domestic violence, where one spouse is genuinely afraid of the other, where there's a serious imbalance of power that can't be managed in a room, or where one person simply refuses to deal in good faith — disclose their finances, show up, tell the truth — the protections of the court system exist for exactly that reason, and using them isn't a failure. But for most other folks, mediation is the modern alternative to the adversarial model of old.

Going Your Own Way, In Your Own Way

The old divorce-industrial complex wasn’t a tradition handed down from on high. It was a default from a time with different values, and it was one reinforced by TV, movies, and loads of expensive attorney advertising funded by expensive cases. And it appealed to the highly individualist ethos of earlier eras that championed “what’s mine is mine, and I’m going to take us both down fighting for it.”

All that said, wanting your divorce to be less awful — financially, mentally, relationally, and spiritually — is not the same as not taking it seriously. I think a lot of people believe on some level that the willingness to fight is how you demonstrate that you care – about your kids, about your future, about not getting taken advantage of. That if you choose the calm route you're being naive, or soft, or you'll find out in ten years that you got played while you were busy being reasonable. That fear is why a lot of people hire the aggressive lawyer, and that’s what keeps the system going.

But you can be extremely serious about protecting yourself and still not want or need a war. Those aren’t in tension. What protects you is understanding what you’re entitled to before you agree to anything, and having someone in the room whose job is to make sure that happens. What doesn’t protect you is spending forty thousand dollars proving an emotional point to someone who could not care less.

And the scoreboard you’re actually playing on isn’t the one in the settlement agreement. It’s what your life looks like in five years. Whether you can stand in the same room at a graduation without your stomach dropping. Whether your kids remember this as a hard year or a hard decade. Whether you're still paying for it, in ways that have nothing to do with money, long after the legal bills stopped.

You get some say in that. Not all of it – the other person gets a vote, and you will have to find a way to work together to close out your marriage in a healthy manner, for both your sakes. But more of it than the 20th century default process would suggest.

You're allowed to do this your own way.