About Belinda

Belinda Rachman was a child of divorce and experienced first-hand the impact that arguing parents and an adversarial divorce system can have on a child.  Although when she was a child mothers were typically given custody, she still felt like she was always caught in the middle and had to choose between one parent and the other.

When Ms. Rachman became a teacher, she worked with severely emotionally disturbed children in psychiatric hospitals, private residential facilities, and public schools.  She also experienced divorce and witnessed the way it affects children in a new light.  Some of her students suffered through far worse circumstances than she had experienced, and she witnessed the incredible lengths some parents would go - including making false statements of sexual abuse - to have an advantage in the custody battle.  Ms. Rachman became personally involved in her students' lives.  In fact, when she was a teacher, she discovered one of her 12 year old students was an orphan and living on his own in New York City; she adopted him and cared for him until he died of AIDS at 22.

Following in her mother's footsteps, Ms. Rachman became a lawyer later in life.  Her mother knew that Ms. Rachman had a tendency to get personally involved with her students and was concerned about her becoming a divorce lawyer.  She ignored her mother's concerns and became a divorce lawyer anyway because she believed she could be a different kind of divorce attorney who could advocate for the children involved in these nasty battles. 

After spending eight years working as a divorce attorney, Ms. Rachman had seen thousands of cases dragged through the adversarial court system.  She hated watching other attorneys fuel their clients' anger just so the lawyers could run up their bills, and she cringed when judges made poor decisions that had terrible affects for the children involved.  Ms. Rachman became so disgusted by the things she saw that she left her successful practice because she could no longer stand to be part of a process that drains people's money and makes them furious at each other.  She knew there was a better way to divorce and thought that, if she could find a way to keep the lawyers out of the process, couples and their children would never have to suffer the way she saw couples suffer in court.  She realized that peaceful, amicable mediation was the best way to help families through their divorces. 

Ms. Rachman decided to never take another divorce case as a private attorney again. Instead, she has dedicated her career to helping couples avoid the court process altogether.  Since Ms. Rachman opened Fair Divorce in a Day Mediation, she has worked with hundreds of couples and each one has come to an agreement.  Ms. Rachman loves staying out of court and helping couples stay away from a system that would grind them up, take their money, and ruin any possibility of them getting along as parents.  Mediation is not for everyone; some people want to fight.  However, for those who want a fair, fast solution and who would rather decide their own lives rather than being told by a judge, mediation is for them.