Costs in Mediation, Decision making, Interests, Lawyers, lawyers in mediation, Legal Issues, Legal Practice, Mediation Lawyering, Negotiation, Tactics, Trial Value

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While it is obvious that law is significant in legal disputes, how the law is used is not so obvious. This piece uses Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous definition of the law as “prophecies of what the courts will do in fact,” rather than rules expressed in statutes, case law etc. It discusses two aspects of…

Conventional wisdom, Decision making, Evaluative Mediation, Improvisation, Intuition, mediation models, Mediation Practice, mediation process, Mindset, Practical Challenges for Mediators, Reflective Practice, Tactics, The role of the mediator

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I was puzzled to get an email from a mediator thanking me for my recent post, which advocated using a unified conceptual framework of unbundled mediation interventions. The puzzling part was that she wrote that it helped to “validate my theory that ‘bundling’ of mediation models can be appropriate and effective in the right case…

Commercial Mediation, Community Mediation, Decision making, Evaluative Mediation, Family Mediation, International commercial mediation, lawyers in mediation, mediation models, Mediation Practice, mediation process, Reflective Practice

(University of Missouri Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution)/ /1 Comment

A quarter century ago, Professor Leonard Riskin published an article describing a grid of mediator orientiations including a facilitative-evaluative dimension.  Despite critiques of this framework, including by Riskin himself, many mediators, trainers, and teachers still use these concepts as mediation models, expressing strong feelings that one model is good and the other is bad. These…

Communication, Decision making, Dialogue, Dispute Resolution, Language, Negotiation, Skills

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“Managing a Client’s expectations and advising them on a course of action turned out to be far more difficult than negotiating with the other Party.” So wrote newly-minted Indian lawyer Varsha Manoj about her experiences negotiating with her clients. Many lawyers in the US and other countries undoubtedly have similar experiences. Legal clients often experience…

Developing the Field, Dispute Resolution, Language, mediation traditions, Negotiation, Reform, Research

(University of Missouri Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution)/ /1 Comment

In 2015, I retired as an American law professor. For most of my career, I used some of the basic concepts of our field such as negotiation, BATNA, positional vs. interest-based negotiation, and facilitative vs. evaluative mediation. I wasn’t always comfortable with these terms, but I used them because I couldn’t imagine shifting to alternatives….

ADR, Dispute Resolution, Future of mediation, Mediation Practice, mediation process, Planning, Reform, Stages of mediation, Time Pressure

(University of Missouri Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution)/ /3 Comments

The deeply-felt norm of conducting mediation on a single day is eroding as everyone adjusts to the realities of the coronavirus crisis and people appreciate the benefits of spreading out the process over time. This post describes the evolution around the world to what I have called “planned early multi-stage mediation.” One-Day Mediations For many…