There are roughly two camps of practitioners on What Do You Value: those who treat it as a niche worth investing in and those who treat it as something they pick up as cases arrive. The camps diverge financially within five years and don’t recover the gap.
This is for mediators who are tired of generic ‘develop your practice’ advice and want specifics about What Do You Value specifically.
For mediators, What Do You Value comes up in the context of helping parties reach agreement, not in producing analytical conclusions for one side. The mediator’s role is structural — surfacing both parties’ interests, identifying common ground, and helping the parties construct durable agreements. Mediators who slip into advisory or evaluative roles on What Do You Value undermine their effectiveness in subsequent sessions.
Start with a clear scope
The engagement letter should specify what’s not in scope as clearly as what is. What Do You Value engagements often sit adjacent to areas the client will assume are covered — tax questions, custody questions, investment questions — that aren’t. Naming these explicitly at scoping eliminates the most common source of mid-engagement misunderstanding.
Scoping is the single highest-leverage moment in a What Do You Value engagement. Practitioners who treat the engagement letter as paperwork rather than as the most important conversation of the matter end up either doing more work than they’re paid for or producing deliverables their clients didn’t want. A scoping conversation that takes an hour upfront saves dozens of hours later.
Keeping the case file usable
Build a third-party document tracker for every What Do You Value engagement. What you’ve requested, when, from whom, what’s arrived, what’s still outstanding. This kind of tracking is unsexy but it’s the single most common reason matters run over timeline.
Versioning matters on What Do You Value deliverables. Practitioners who maintain a clean version history (draft 1, draft 2, etc., with dates and changes noted) produce deliverables faster and can show their work if anyone questions a specific choice. For deeper reference, see ABA Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators.
Coordinate with the broader team
The protocol for coordination matters. Some matters require frequent multi-professional calls; others require occasional written updates; others require near-silence between the mediator and other professionals on the case. Set the protocol at scoping with the client and the other professionals so nobody is confused about who’s expected to do what.
When co-professionals on a case have different views about the right analytical or strategic approach, the mediator’s role is to do their own work well and present their conclusions clearly, not to relitigate every disagreement. The attorney or client makes the final strategic call; the mediator’s job is to make sure the analytical inputs are sound.
Ongoing learning that compounds
Specialty credentials in What Do You Value send a signal to referral sources, but the actual value comes from the curriculum behind them. Practitioners who go through a credential program seriously emerge with better analytical frameworks than those who treat the credential as a marketing line.
Reading the trade publications that cover What Do You Value matters more than most practitioners give it credit for. Thirty minutes a week, sustained across a year, produces a working sense of where the field is moving. Practitioners who do this find themselves citing relevant developments in client conversations and case strategy; those who don’t fall behind quietly.
How the closing affects the next referral
Some What Do You Value engagements end without producing the outcome the client hoped for. Closing those engagements well — being honest about what the work produced and why — matters more than closing the successful ones. The client may not feel great about the outcome, but they’ll remember that you were straight with them, which produces referrals over time even from disappointing matters.
How a What Do You Value engagement closes affects the next several referrals more than how it opens. Practitioners who send a clean closing letter — recapping what was delivered, confirming any open items the client should know about, formally concluding the engagement — produce stronger ongoing relationships with both clients and referral sources than those who let engagements trail off ambiguously.
The honest summary of What Do You Value for mediators: it rewards depth, it punishes shortcuts, and it compounds across years for practitioners willing to invest in the long arc.
How VennBoard fits in
VennBoard supports the kind of case-management discipline What Do You Value engagements benefit from: organized case files, integrated communication with co-professionals, deliverable versioning, and the kind of operational consistency that makes the difference between burning out at twenty matters and running a sustainable practice at fifty.
For mediators ready to see how VennBoard supports What Do You Value engagements, visit VennBoard.com.