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At the core of issues of public policies modernization and in particular of the cost reduction target, mediation, one of the alternative legal dispute resolution methods, developed from the 1990s in France and then became institutionalized. In 2017, the experimentation of the obligation of family mediation prior to any referral to the court, called TMFPO (Attempt of compulsory prior family mediation) completes this institutionalization, while changing mediators’ conditions of intervention. In line with scholar works on relations between the professions and the State in France, the article seeks to understand how a public policy comes to transform a profession, in particular by its role as prescriber. Based on a survey carried out in 2019-2020 among family mediators, judges in family cases and litigants who have dealt with the TMFPO, the article highlights how the professional accept this change and adjusts, as a price to pay for the extension of the professional jurisdiction, as proposed by the State. From this problematic professionalization, the article shows the paradoxical effects of this public policy on the mediators: while it allowed an extension of their collective jurisdiction, and a development of the profession, it also produces a loss of autonomy of mediators, a distance to the professional mandate, a segmentation of the group and a lack of legitimacy.