For the professional running the room
Every other number in a divorce has a method behind it.Maintenance has eight factors.
So the file stalls on the one issue nobody can price, both parties arrive certain, and the room runs out of process before it runs out of disagreement. This is the protocol I use to get through it — every stage, the scripts, and the checklists.
- The gapdocumented shortfall
- Earning capacitythe payor's wall
- The ceilingequalization, as outer edge
- Published-formula bandfive legislatures, one distribution
Each framework produces a range, not a number. The overlap is where the conversation happens. Illustrative shape only — no case, no figures, and no prediction about what any court would do.
Why this one stalls
The unpredictability is measured, not anecdotal.
Marsha Garrison’s study of maintenance decisions found the duration outcome effectively unpredictable — under one percent of the variance explained in settled cases, with the deciding judge’s political party out-predicting every statutory factor except the length of the marriage.
That is not a gap in anyone’s preparation. It is a gap in the law, and it means the honest professional cannot resolve the deadlock by being more authoritative about the answer. The only thing left to supply is structure.
Garrison, How Do Judges Decide Divorce Cases?, 74 N.C. L. Rev. 401 (1996).
The one intervention with evidence behind it
35% → 4%
Impasse rate before and after parties were asked to argue against their own position. Self-critique is the only debiasing move in the negotiation literature that reliably survives contact with real disputants — and the protocol is built around getting it done properly rather than performatively.
Babcock, Loewenstein & Issacharoff, 22 Law & Soc. Inquiry 913 (1997).
What’s in it
The whole protocol, in the order you run it.
The stage numbers below are the method’s own, not a marketing sequence. They are what you will write in your own notes.
- Stage
0
Intake
Written, before anyone is in a room.
The mediated budget exchange and why raw exchange is the single most destructive step in the naive version. Mandatory budget categories, so no one's numbers are authored by shame. The six private statements that surface which fairness norm each spouse is running, and how the gap between the two profiles forecasts the deadlock. The statutory screen. Four case routes assigned here and announced to the couple up front.
Budget workbook structure · norm elicitation set · routing rules
- Stage
0.5
The income foundation
Before any range exists.
Documented sources for every case, and the flag rule for anything imputed. The contested-income protocol for self-employed and fuzzy-comp payors: running two ranges instead of one so the fight becomes which range rather than you're a liar, the settlement-purposes normalized figure, and how to price the alternative path without ever advising on it.
Source checklist · dual-range protocol · imputation flag rule
- Stage
1
Individual meetings
Four moves, each aimed at a different party profile.
The self-critique exercise, reframed by audience — adversarial for the armored party, strengths and weaknesses for the conceder, because the naive symmetric version trains the wrong muscle in exactly the person who least needs it. The norm pre-frame. The finality preview for equity payors and owners. The legacy question, asked once.
Both scripts, verbatim · the audience test · confidentiality mechanics
- Stage
2
The joint session
Fifteen to seventy-five minutes, by route.
The against-interest concession that opens it. The three fairnesses plus the earning-capacity slot the breadwinner payors need. The two-household arithmetic, set before either statement is on screen, and the sentence to never use in its place. The two-layer range — the case-specific anchors plus a verified five-state formula band, each pedigree stated, presented under four rules that stop range-shopping. The after-tax table. Then three packages of roughly equivalent value — certainty, duration, closure — built from the component library: slope, checkpoints, triggers, bonus and variable income, retirement, buyout, offsets, security, finality.
Full session script · the two-layer range · the three packages
- Stage
2.5a
The circuit breaker
Mandatory. Five minutes. Before anyone picks a package.
A private caucus with each spouse immediately before a package is chosen, because this is where the capitulator folds — inside ninety seconds, because a defensible number ends the discomfort. This is where the self-critique gets used protectively rather than persuasively, and it is the step most likely to be skipped by a practitioner reading the method quickly.
The two-choice question · what to do with the inventory
- Stage
2.9
The term sheet
Built as a handoff instrument, not a summary.
What goes on page one, what goes in the middle, and what goes on the last page. The decisions that have to be named explicitly — review-date defaults, trigger mechanics, cost-of-living, and the three-way distinction between reserved, waived, and set at zero. Why no range advocacy appears anywhere in the document. The reconvene valve, and why it converts a conditional referral into a default one.
Decision checklist · the open-questions page · the no-advocacy rule
- Stage
3
The log
One row per case.
The fields worth capturing, the pre-registered success criteria, and why next-day private ratings beat in-room ratings taken under the gaze of an ex and a mediator. At forty to sixty cases this becomes an outcomes dataset, which is the only durable advantage available in this work.
Field schema · success criteria · the ratings instrument
What this is
- A process manual for the conversation, start to finish.
- The scripts, in the words that survived contact with real parties.
- The routing rules — which of four case types you are in, and what changes.
- A term sheet decision checklist: every question that must be answered before a handoff is clean.
- The failure modes, and which step each one is hiding in.
What it deliberately is not
- Not clause language, and not a drafting template.
- Not court forms.
- Not a calculator, and not a way to predict what a judge would award. The method opens by conceding that nobody can.
- Not legal advice, to you or to anyone you use it with.
- Not a credential, and not a qualification for any roster.
Who wrote it
Ryan McLaughlin
Mediator · Saint Paul, Minnesota
Flannel People Mediation runs divorce, family, post-decree and business mediation, entirely virtual, rated 4.9 across 285+ Google reviews. The protocol in this guide is the third version. The first went through a structured critique and an attorney review, and roughly a third of it changed — the budget exchange became mediated rather than raw, the self-critique split into two scripts by party profile, and several sentences were cut outright for detonating in the room. The second went through an expert review of its analytical core, which rebuilt the budget on twelve months of actuals, rebuilt the formula band on verified final-support statutes, and converted the close into a choice among three packages.
The guide includes what changed and why, because knowing which sentence failed is usually worth more than the sentence that replaced it.
Private mediation only. Not a Rule 114 qualified neutral.
$500
one payment, permanent access
The guide opens immediately after checkout at a link that stays yours. Method updates appear at the same address, at no additional cost.
Refunded within thirty days if it is not useful to your practice.
Questions
- Who is this guide for?
- Mediators, collaborative professionals, and family law attorneys who run their own sessions and keep hitting the same wall on spousal maintenance. It assumes you already know how to run a room. It is not an introduction to mediation.
- Is this a set of forms or clause language?
- No. It teaches process. There is no clause wording, no court forms, and no template agreement language anywhere in it. The term sheet material is a decision checklist — it names every question that has to be answered before a handoff is clean, and leaves the drafting to the attorneys who do that work.
- Does it work outside Minnesota?
- The structure does. The statutory screen in Stage 0 is written against Minnesota law and you would swap in your own. The rest — the mediated budget exchange, the income foundation, the self-critique, the anchor sequence, the circuit breaker — is jurisdiction-neutral, because it is built on how people negotiate under ambiguity rather than on any one statute.
- Does the guide predict what a court would award?
- No, and the method treats that as a feature. The opening move of the joint session is a concession that nobody can price the outcome — not the mediator, not either attorney. The whole structure exists because the amount question has no formula behind it. Anything that claimed otherwise would be selling a prediction the research does not support.
- What do I actually get for the price?
- A hosted runbook you keep access to, covering every stage of the protocol with the scripts, the routing rules, the anchor construction, and the checklists. The link is permanent. Updates to the method appear at the same address.
- Is there a refund?
- Yes. If you read it and it is not useful to your practice, email within thirty days and it is refunded, no questions asked. You will have read the whole thing by then, which is the point.