Sarah B.
serious ethical problems
I am writing this review in the hopes of reaching others considering working with Matt Smith Rubio. My ex husband and myself worked with Matt as a divorce mediator for 9 months. Matt referred us to Amy Adler, a divorce financial consultant, and we ended up in mediation with the both Matt and Amy. As the process unfolded, I realized that Matt and Amy were friends, had not mediated together before and had not invested any time, as far as I could tell, in discerning how they would function together professionally. In essence they were practicing collaborative divorce with no training, background or experience. Multiple ethically questionable situations arose and when I asked that they be addressed neither Matt nor Amy took responsibility. While I experienced both parties as lacking a clear sense of ethics, Matts behavior was deeply concerning, so much so that I am here a year after my divorce, in a much better place but still disturbed and wanting to protect others. I will give the most basic and obvious example of Matts lack of ethics as I can share this without much context. In our last mediation session, before I insisted Matt withdraw, Matt did not track the details of an agreement that he actively helped broker. By this I mean he carried details of the agreement between chat rooms on zoom and mediated alterations and changes to the agreement. Later, in that same session, while writing up the agreement, Matt allowed my ex to alter the agreement in ways that gutted the whole intent. Matt did not respond to my distress over the alterations in the session. After the session he defended himself by saying he was/is not responsible for remembering the details of agreements his clients make. While, as a good faith mediator, this may be true in some instances, it clearly was/is not true of the situation in question. As a good faith mediator, Matt had a clear obligation to slow the process, be an outside witness and hold space for a full discussion when my husband proposed changes that altered the intent and purpose of a major agreement we had just make. To me it was/is clear that by not doing so, Matt allowed a power imbalance to occur. I do not believe anyone would enter willingly into mediation if they knew the mediator believed they were not responsible for monitoring cearly observable, potentially bad faith negotiation tactics, happening on their watch. It is possible that Matt did not fully understand the agreement he helped broker as it was a financial matter and Amy Adler, the financial consultant participated during the initial negotiations. This is another ethical problem as he should not have allowed my ex to renegotiate terms outside his area of expertise. Life is complicated, divorce mediation is intense, we are all human and make mistakes. But Matt was unable to take any responsibility. Rather than engage with the complexity of the situation and try to repair mistakes, he repeated over and over that he had no obligation to recall the details of agreements his clients negotiate. Over the time we worked with Matt, I observed multiple patterns of behavior that were deeply concerning but I have shared the above because it is largely context independent. There simply is no way a mediator, of any kind, is not obligated to track what happens while they are actively mediating.