At a “Second Saturday” workshop offering advice on divorce, attorney Robert MacFarlane tells the tale of two couples who came to him to mediate an end to their marriages. The first started the divorce process with husband and wife taking the conventional approach. Each hired a divorce litigator and spent the next two years in and out of court, unsuccessfully trying to resolve their differences. Bills mounted, and after the husband had spent $72,000 and the wife $68,000, the desperate husband told his lawyer he was going broke. As a last resort, his lawyer referred him to mediation, an alternative approach to divorce that brought them to MacFarlane’s office. “It took us three hours to reach an agreement,” recalls the mediator. “We stopped the hemorrhaging, but we couldn’t get them back the $140,000 after-tax dollars or the two years of their life.”

The second couple — husband and wife were both high-powered entertainment industry executives — opted for mediation from the outset. MacFarlane says these clients wound up spending a total of $2,200 in mediation fees to split $3.7 million in assets.

Mediation is vastly cheaper than conventional divorce litigation for a reason, MacFarlane tells the audience filling the lecture room at MiraCosta Community College. “An analogy would be the difference between sending a team of mediators to negotiate peace as opposed to sending the fleet and a division of Marines to wage war,” he explains. “One’s going to take a lot more and cost a lot more money. They are two entirely different processes.”

MacFarlane is a true believer. A family law attorney for 26 years, he personally experienced the advantages of mediation when he used it for his own divorce. Convinced of its benefits, he became a mediator 13 years ago and began phasing out of divorce litigation. So far he has mediated about 600 divorces and now uses mediation exclusively in his practice.

He speaks passionately for following the path of reason. Some marital breakups — those involving physical abuse, for instance — are more appropriately handled in divorce court. But MacFarlane estimates that more than 90 percent could be settled through mediation. “The goal of this process is a solution,” he explains. “We don’t pit husband vs. wife. We pit husband and wife against the problem.”

In contrast, the goal of divorce litigation is to win. “Victories only serve one party,” he says, “and in my experience, it isn’t either of the combatants. It’s frequently the litigators and the people who get to buy everything you own at a garage sale. They are the winners.” He paints a grim picture of what often awaits couples who choose to slug it out in divorce court. As hostility rises, husbands and wives will become adversaries. They will hire lawyers as personal gladiators, charged with extracting maximum gain at the expense of their partners. The first casualty will be civility. No prisoners will be taken on these emotional killing fields. Like the mutually destructive couple in the dark divorce comedy, “The War of the Roses,” spouses sometimes will go to the mat to deprive their partners of the possessions they most treasure.

Worse still, their children will be caught in the crossfire. In the courthouse, frightened youngsters involved in custody disputes will pass through metal detectors, and in locked rooms strangers will interrogate them, MacFarlane tells his audience. They will be terrified that something they say will cause them never to see one or both of their parents again. They will witness their parents hurling nasty charges against one another.

“I know of nothing uglier than a custody dispute,” he says. “Two people who loved each other enough to have this child are now trying to prove that the other is so despicable that they shouldn’t be allowed to parent their own child.”

His arguments and admonishments are aimed at nudging the divorcing women in the audience away from thoughts of a bitter revenge in the courtroom — and toward a mediation process considered better for spouses and their children in the long run. Advocates note that mediation not only is cheaper, it lets marriage partners take control and custom design their own marriage settlement agreement. The process is voluntary and confidential. In mediation, the parties meet face to face to work out issues. The session is guided by the mediator, who offers information, helps the spouses craft the terms of their divorce, and completes their legal paperwork. To gain the trust of both parties, the mediators — almost always family law attorneys — stay neutral. If the mediation falls through and the couple moves on to court, the mediator can’t be made to testify for either side.

San Diego Superior Court Judge James Milliken, who took over as supervising judge of the family courts in January, praises mediation as a better option than going to court, particularly for couples with children under 18. “We’re philosophically 100 percent supportive of the process,” he says. “It gets people to a much more reasonable, hopefully respectful and even elegant result. It’s clearly the method of choice in this area because of the ongoing need for these parents to work with each other until their children reach the age of majority.”

He expresses dismay over the spectacle of divorcing spouses going for the jugular, using the courtroom as an arena for revenge, even dragging children into the courts to denounce the other spouse.

“In criminal court, we see bad people trying to behave their best in order to minimize the consequences of their criminal behavior,” Milliken says. “In divorce court, we see good people at their worst.” Typically, couples litigating in a high-conflict divorce often refuse to accept the marital settlement agreement, with one spouse or the other returning to court again and again to demand changes in visitation or to relitigate other divorce terms.

Milliken, who has served as presiding judge of the juvenile courts for the past six and a half years, believes an interminable divorce conflict damages children. In contrast, a mediated agreement might enable the spouses to get on with their lives, he says, and if they remarry, actually create two families for the children, with more adults supporting and caring for them.

To minimize the chances of acrimony and “get-even” syndromes, Milliken is organizing a family law court program that will set status conferences early in the divorce process for each couple coming into the court system. The aim is to educate the spouses and steer them to mediation or to collaborative groups that involve lawyers, therapists and other professionals to smooth the way for the divorce. He says the initial program will be up and running at the Downtown family law court within 90 days, and at the other family law courts in the county by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, mediation is taking root and expanding in the legal community. For instance, the San Diego Mediation Center, which handles a wide array of business and personal disputes, added divorce mediation to its services eight years ago. Five lawyers work on the center’s mediation panel. Robin Seigle, administrator of the center’s divorce program, notes they are well-qualified to deal with the turbulence emanating from failing marriages. All the attorneys specialize in family law, and four of them hold undergraduate degrees in either psychology or social work. “Our program has been growing dramatically in the last couple of years,” Seigle says, “and our best source of referrals is from therapists and our previous clients.”

The mediations are informal but structured to enhance the possibility of resolving issues. Each spouse is given uninterrupted time to describe the issues surrounding the marriage. The process typically advances in stages. At the first orientation meeting, the parties are asked to gather documents and financial information. Joint sessions are then held to identify and resolve issues based on legal and other information. Finally, after the parties reach an agreement in principle, the mediator drafts a marital settlement agreement, which can be reviewed by independent attorneys or financial counselors before a final version is prepared.

The center charges $180 an hour for divorce mediation services, with the total process costing less then $3,000 and sometimes as low as $500, says Seigle. Besides the low cost, flexibility is another advantage to mediation. Seigle notes mediation can be used before or after filing for dissolution. The spouses may come to the center for mediation even if they have lawyers. “They can use mediation for any part of the process without using the full service,” says Seigle. “The philosophy is that mediation makes it possible for people to make choices for themselves all along the way.”

The center’s mediators garner praise from clients who say they benefited from the service. For example, Robert, a retired Navy officer and financial adviser with grown children, wanted a divorce that would preserve the couple’s community assets rather than squander them on attorneys’ fees. “We didn’t want to gouge each other,” he recalls. Husband and wife met with a center mediator three times over a two-and-a-half-month period, coming up with a marital settlement agreement both felt was fair and favorable. Robert describes the mediator who guided them through the process as “helpful, non-threatening and without an agenda for either party.” The total cost, including legal filing fees, came to less than $2,600.

With the process gaining public favor, other attorneys are turning away from divorce litigation to practice mediation. One of them, Rich Gordon, who started his Fair Way Mediation Center six years ago Downtown, says it’s more gratifying to have people work out solutions in private than to “hang out their dirty laundry in divorce court.” He says the couples coming to him for mediation don’t always wind up divorcing. About 20 percent wind up reconciling. “Not everyone who says they want a divorce really wants one,” he says.

If, however, one spouse really wants the divorce and the other doesn’t, how do mediators get the reluctant party to the mediating table? MacFarlane says he offers the incentive of a free first consultation to explain the process. The spouse seeking mediation can make the appointment and ask the other to come or have the other spouse phone the mediator for information. In some cases, a spouse can serve the other with a petition for mediation, along with a polite and persuasive letter, says MacFarlane.

Besides the cost advantages to divorcing spouses, MacFarlane argues that mediation offers the best chance to preserve the intangibles of the marriage. What value is placed, he asks, on the ability of a divorced husband or spouse to go to their children’s weddings and graduations without family members squirming in discomfort? What value is placed on a sentimental item that would sell for a few dollars at a garage sale? The courts do not deal with these intangibles, he says.

Seigle says divorcing people often are unaware that California is a no-fault divorce state. Unless there is domestic violence or some other extraordinary circumstance, community property is divided equally regardless of which spouse occupies the higher moral ground. “The public’s view of the court system is that what is good and fair and right is what’s going to happen, and that’s not always what happens,” she says.

She says mediation is a better alternative even when the parties are angry and in conflict. “I think it’s important for people to realize they don’t have to be friendly, they don’t have to like each other and they don’t have to be happy at the end in order for mediation to be appropriate for them,” she says. “They only have to be willing to work out the issues.”