Los Angeles County has recently decided to extend its eviction moratorium through the end of 2022 for residential tenants. The extension gives some of the many people with rental debt additional time to apply for rental assistance in an effort to eliminate most debt by the end of the year. There are some carve outs and requirements to fall under the protections of the extension. This is your quick guide to understanding how this might impact you, and how mediation can help in certain circumstances.

Although mediation is overall very successful, the reasons it fails versus when it is successful tends to establish patterns of success and failure. Preparing for mediation includes physical preparation as well as mental preparation in order to be able to make decisions from a place of clarity about a situation and with more grounded expectations about what options might be available to the parties.

If you’ve ever signed a cell phone contract, utility or virtually any other agreement for goods or services these days, you have agreed to resolve any dispute with the other party through arbitration. There are several key things about it that make it different from court, and some are both potentially beneficial or detrimental depending on circumstances.

Many people hear that mediation can be a fraction of the cost of going to court and are skeptical, or may not understand how that could be possible. While there are certainly some situations where mediation makes less sense, there are many more reasons that support the use of mediation in a wide range of scenarios.

Sometimes a dispute will settle in a way that is a little surprising. One party may accept an offer relatively early on in negotiation talks, or at a point that comes unexpectedly. This is not always a result of inexperience in negotiation, but of a conscious decision to move on and focus efforts elsewhere.

Just before California’s eviction moratorium was set to expire at the end of June, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed new legislation which extended the moratorium through the end of September. In addition, the bill also made more of the $5.2 billion in rental relief accessible.