Mediation First Avis 

Réponse de Mediation First

20 juil. 2026

Dear Lucy,

Thank you for taking the time to leave your review of your experience with Mediation First.

It is always disappointing to receive a negative review and in response I thought it may help to explain the situation – this is done whilst respecting the confidentiality of your meeting with our mediator.

Your initial one-to-one meeting was covered by legal aid funding and in that meeting, as in all initial meetings, you were presented with information about family mediation and other non-court dispute resolution options. The mediator also discussed the specific circumstances that you were looking to mediate about in relation to your daughter to see whether mediation would be safe and appropriate. As the potential mediation would be funded by legal aid the subject of the mediation is required to meet certain criteria, as set out by the Legal Aid Agency, to ensure it falls within the scope of public funding.

Having talked through your specific situation our mediator had to conclude that it did not constitute a matter that could be resolved within the family courts. In your case, therefore, the mediator could only come to the conclusion that legally aided mediation for this matter would not be possible at this time.

I appreciate that this may be have been disappointing to you, however, should your circumstances change in the future then we would of course be more than happy to facilitate a mediation should that be the most appropriate way to proceed for all parties concerned.

I wish you all the best for the future.
Tom
Mediation First

Réponse de Mediation First

7 juil. 2026

Dear Chris,

Thank you for taking the time to leave this review of your experience with us.

It is really useful for us to receive feedback from our clients and I will forward on your comments to your mediator for their reflection.

To try to address your comments here, bearing in mind the need to keep details of your case confidential, the costs you were charged were in line with our standard pricing. This is £125+VAT per person per hour which is very typical for family mediation services – the Family Mediation Council suggests a figure of £130 to £170 per person per hour. This includes time spent within mediation sessions as well as drafting documentation and time spent on admin such as emails.

In your case a document was drafted by the mediator and this was produced following some back and forth between yourself and your ex in relation to the details required. Whilst our mediators will always try to limit the charges we pass on to clients for admin, if the process takes sometime outside of the session then, as set out in our pricing guides, our mediators will charge for their time to respond to emails etc.

Having reviewed your costs, what was charged on this case represented good value for the work our mediator carried out including an initial exploratory joint session and the document. The Open Financial Statement that was produced in your case is an essential document required prior to considering the options that could be discussed within a further joint mediation session. Our mediators are accredited with the Family Mediation Council and are highly skilled and experienced at producing this document which can be made available as part of the court process. It is likely that it would have been considerably more costly for a solicitor to collate and produce a similar document as part of their process.

Reviewing the case correspondence, our mediator offered to spend time within a session to explain what information is contained in the document and why some information is left out, however, a decision was made not to continue with mediation and so they did not in the end have the opportunity to do this.

I hope this helps to address your query, however, should you wish to speak with us directly about your experience then please contact our Mediation Support Team on 0330 3207600 and they will be happy to put you in touch with one of our directors.

Best wishes
Tom
Mediation First