Yesterday was an interesting day for me. I spent the day in a training for a Personnel Commission for which I have served as a Hearing Officer for over a decade. At its conclusion, a very young female participant in the training took me aside and complemented me for being a “bad ass” woman whom she hoped to emulate in her burgeoning career.
Chances are you heard this wise advice from your Mom when she reminded you that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
When our mother was alive, she used to tell the story that about six weeks after my eldest sister was born, my mother boarded a crowded war time train with my sister in her arms to meet my father then stationed in Nebraska in the Army.
Mediation can be hard. Often, the parties start out a great distance apart, work towards narrowing the gap, but occasionally can’t quite straddle the gulf to come to an agreement in a single day. Last week, I gave my final lesson to my students at Pepperdine on sophisticated steps for breaking an impasse. I told them that it was a matter of both skill and faith.
There are better and worse ways to do it. The Muse’s article on delivering bad news to your boss has lessons for talking to clients and colleagues too.
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I have had a series of mediations in which I have wondered who was actually in authority? The attorney or the client? As we have all learned somewhere along the line, when it comes to attorneys representing clients….
Lawsuits are products. I know this sounds strange particularly to lawyers who after four years of college, three years of law school and then one or more bar examinations, do not want to consider themselves mere sales people….
“In ‘litigation as usual,’ settlement often comes only after adversarial posturing, the original conflict escalates, the relationships deteriorate, the process takes too long and costs too much, and nobody is really happy with the resolution
I would say all of those cases were ripe for mediation at the time I was asked to mediate them. How can that be? Simple. In each case, the attorneys/parties had the right information, and a strong enough desire to settle, in order to make good decisions. Could those cases, which were further into the judicial process, have been resolved sooner? Possibly. But in retrospect, I don’t think they were ready until we mediated them.