Asking questions is one of the most powerful – and often misused – tools for professionals in dispute resolution settings, whether legal, workplace, mediation or anywhere. When you are dealing with high-conflict clients, it is especially important to consider the timing of different types of questions and also to know what questions you should never ask.
From New York, an interesting institutional approach to small-stakes dispute resolution: the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH).According to the article, OATH was created in 1979 as an “independent alternative” to internal agency tribunals.
I’ve handled any number of mediations where the parties and counsel view prospects for settlement with optimism. Lately, I’m seeing more and more pre-mediation conferences being held in complicated cases or cases where the prospects of settlement seem less likely.
I love the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution annual conferences. They always put on a wide array of wonderful sessions and it’s a great time to connect with friends, old and new. As in the past, I am listing some sessions that particularly intrigue me.
Peter Joy (Washinton University School of Law) has published “The Uneasy History of Experiential Education in U.S. Law Schools,” forthcoming in the Dickinson Law Review and available here. The abstract: This article explores the history of legal education, particularly the rise of experiential learning and its importance.
There aren’t many benefits to being in a bad mood, even if that’s your reliable, long-standing default mode. Being in a bad mood can make you less effective, less open to creative solutions, and due to stress, it can affect your health. Most peoples’ jobs have a degree of stress, some much more than others.
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.
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.
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.
Scholastica, the service many of us use to disseminate our articles to law reviews, recently interviewed Donna Shestowsky (UC-Davis) about her work on litigant awareness of court ADR programs. Here’s the interview in full.