Negotiation Law Blog

Chris Hill's Mediation Training 

By taking the role of the mediator in particular, I had to take off my advocate hat and force myself to let the parties work to a solution despite my desire to jump across the table and shake them until reason, and what I thought was the proper legal solution, prevailed.  I found it difficult to sit there and just listen before doing something I am far from used to outside of a client counseling role, namely remove (instead of add) the types of loaded words that all lawyers use in advocacy and to replace them with more neutral words when clarifying the parties interests.

By the end of a couple of the role plays my brain hurt because of the use of mental muscles that I hadn’t used out in the open.  By trying (sometimes sucessfully, sometimes less so) to remove my past experience as an attorney in mediation and as a litigator in order to guide the parties to a decision with which they could live and that they came to on their own, I learned how hard it is sometimes to let the process work.  I gained a better understanding and appreciation for good mediators who can take two parties that have been at each other’s throats for nearly a year and bring them to a solution.

Welcome to the club, Chris!

Check out my first blog post on the Forbes.com legal blog, On the Docket, New York Anti-Bullying Law a Big Bad Idea.

I know, opposing a law that seeks to prevent workplace bullying is like criticizing mom and apple pie.  Still.  More workplace litigation???  And why isn't the existing cause of action for the intentional infliction of emotional distress a perfectly good alternative for anyone who's truly "severely" damaged by "outrageous" conduct that goes beyond the bounds of human civility?

One of the great benefits of posting on this topic over at Forbes.com is the number of comments it generates.  Not because it insures "hits" but because it engages a far larger community in a constructive multilogue on an issue of genuine and important public interest.  Here's an excerpt:

According to a post in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog yesterday --  For Businesses, Bully Lawsuits May Pose New Threat -- New York's state Senate has passed a surprisingly bipartisan workplace anti-bullying law.

According to the Journal, the law would "allow workers who've been physically, psychologically or economically abused while on the job to file charges against their employers in civil court."

Economically abused????? The mind boggles.

The bill defines "bullying" broadly as  the "repeated use of derogatory remarks, insults and epithets" that the (mythical and chronically overly sensitive) "reasonable person" would "find threatening, intimidating or humiliating."

Let's give this proposal a second thought, particularly in the context of legal practice.  We lawyers do endeavor to "keep calm and carry on."  We have been known, however, to push ourselves and to be pushed past our tempers' limits.  We're human.  We're under a lot of pressure.  And we're fallible.

Read more here.

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If the negotiated resolution of disputes is all about values; personal narratives; and, collaborative problem solving, the televised-negotiated-resolution-Bible is Lost, which ended a six-year run last night in a series of spiritual awakenings for each of the major characters. 

I'm addicted to something that doesn't exist.  ~  William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This is where those sensible folks who have never been addicted to narrative nor worshiped at the altar of character development check out of the post.  Please do return. 

Live Together, Die Alone

Your plane crashes on a desert island.  Your fellow survivors are, as former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote in Aristotle, already "in the thick of it."

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.

Where are you?  Are there "others" on the island who would do your newborn society harm?  How will resources be distributed?  Who, if anyone, is fit and willing, to lead? Is there food and drinking water?  Will some members of your community begin to hoard food for themselves?  Can anyone track, hunt, kill and bar-b-q the wild boars that roam the island?  Who will settle disputes?  Who will betray you and who defend you? 

And when will you be rescued?

Now that we know that the island is the spiritual place - the dreamworld - the unconscious - where the survivors are challenged by inner and outer demons and given the chance to experience the healing grace inside every human heart - the mysteries need never be solved and the "truth" need never be revealed.   The "others" and the Dharma initiative and Jacob; the hydrogen bomb and the time travel; are all just the busy work against which the characters will achieve, or fall short, of their human and spiritual potential.

Yet, as Christian Shepard says at series' end - all of your experiences were real, Jack.

"Lost" as the Prisoners' Dilemma

The first two seasons of Lost were all about the Prisoners' Dilemma - is it better to cooperate with our fellows or to betray them?  And which makes us happier?

As I explain in "K is for Kin" in the upcoming ABC's of Conflict Resolution,

If a propensity for physical violence were the most prominent human characteristic, we surely would have wiped ourselves off the face of the earth by now. That we haven’t speaks to something even deeper within us than our collective desire to dominate others and control all available resources for our own benefit. Let’s take a deep breath and pause to remember that despite our sorry history of armed conflict, we also managed to land men on the moon, eradicate or drastically reduce a wide array of infectious diseases, end legalized racial segregation, grant women the right to vote in nearly every country in the world, and build civilizations that, for all their flaws, exhibit nearly continuous progress from barbarity to self-governance.

At the local level, most of us stop at red lights; wait patiently in line at the grocery store; refrain from hitting one another when angry; stay off other people’s property unless invited; play organized sports according to rules laid down decades ago; sit quietly through lectures, plays and movies; arrive at work on time; and, pay for what we gather in retail stores to feed and clothe our families. In extremis we not only behave ourselves, we often act heroically – putting our own lives in danger to save those of others – even when they are strangers to us. Firemen enter burning buildings; doctors and nurses risk their own health tending the well-being of others; police officers chase men with guns and enter abandoned buildings even when doing so is likely to get them injured or killed; and a great number of us would reflexively dash out into a street to save someone else’s child from being run over by a truck.

If each of us has decided to answer to the higher angels of our human nature, how might we convince our fellows to do the same? Once again, we turn to the evolutionary biologists for help.

In 1984, Professor Robert Axelrod organized a world-wide tournament among computer programmers. He issued an invitation seeking winning computer strategies for a game called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma poses a problem involving trust, self-seeking and collaboration that economists use to show why people often fail to cooperate even if it is in both of their best interests to do so.

The game begins its life as the story of a human dilemma. Two suspects are arrested by the police for burglary. Because the police do not have sufficient evidence to convict either suspect, they can only secure a conviction if they are able to convince at least one of the two to confess the crime and implicate his partner. To coax the suspects to confess, the police offer each one the same deal. If either one of the two accused individuals testifies against his partner, he will be freed and his partner will receive a ten-year sentence. If both confess and testify against one another, each will receive a five-year sentence. If both remain silent, they will be sentenced to only six months in jail. These offers are made to the suspects in separate rooms.

The optimal choice for both partners in crime is to cooperate with one another by remaining silent. If they do so, each will earn only a six-month jail sentence. The optimal solution for the individual suspect is to “rat out” his partner, securing his own freedom. Because neither partner is capable of predicting the other’s choice, the only “rational” decision is mutual betrayal.

To learn the best means of resolving this dilemma, Professor Axelrod and others like him engaged their research subjects in repeated rounds – or “iterations” – of the game. Because our community life requires us to daily choose between cooperation and generosity on the one hand, and independence and selfishness on the other, this iterated prisoner’s dilemma best represented conflicts among our fellows in everyday life. Of the fifty iterated Prisoner Dilemma programs submitted to Professor Axelrod, one – named Tit for Tat – was the clear winner. Tit for Tat began each round of play with each new player by cooperating. If cooperative play was met with betrayal, Tit for Tat retaliated on the next occasion it “met” the non-cooperative gamer. Only if that program returned to cooperation would Tit for Tat do the same.

Those programs that were designed to cooperate haphazardly or to continue cooperating in the face of betrayal, were repeatedly victimized. Those programs that chronically betrayed their fellow gamers, became locked in escalating spirals of retaliatory play.

Only Tit for Tat behaved the way evolutionary biologists believe successful human survivors played the game of life. Those survivors were pre-disposed to cooperate with their fellows in at least some circumstances – circumstances in which their families or “kin” were threatened. Those inclined to betray did not, however, die out completely. To bring disreputable players back into the cooperative endeavors that would assure the family’s survival, it was necessary for punishments to be meted out. Banishment or penalties of death for non-cooperative players were not retaliatory options except under extreme circumstances. To survive, families needed “all hands on deck.” The “fittest” to survive, like the winning Tit for Tat computer program, quickly forgave as soon as punishment brought uncooperative family members back into line.

We appear to be hard-wired for cooperation in the same way Tit for Tat was programmed for success. When research subjects played the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma while attached to equipment monitoring brain activity, the brains of those who were cooperating with one another lit up like pinball machines. Not only did the cooperators win more total points for cooperation than did the betrayers, they were happier whether they were winning or not. As the neuroscientists discovered, when we cooperate, the neurochemical that gives us pleasure – dopamine – is released. At the same time that the cooperators’ brains were being bathed in the warm glow of dopamine, their impulse inhibition areas were activated, helping them resist the lure of self-seeking.

Our evolutionary history has created us to be a “band of brothers” – a human family that places the well-being of the tribe on a higher level than anyone’s “personal best.” If family members betray us (and they will) we doom our effort to secure compliance if we fail to retaliate. A sharp slap on the wrist or even expressed disapproval (the powerful shock of shaming) is usually sufficient to bring miscreants back into line. To optimize the benefits to be gained by cooperation among the greatest number of family members, we must be quick to forgive when our retaliatory actions bear fruit.

As I became more and more involved in the complexities of the Lost narrative, the through line for me was always the Prisoner's Dilemma.  The survivors lied about their motives.  They betrayed one another.  They remained silent when speaking might have saved them.  They demonized "the others" only to find that demons inhabited their own hearts as well.  When the squabbling amongst them threatened to pull them apart, another threat from "the others" or the wild boars or the deadly black smoke or the hydrogen bomb, drew them back together.  And over time, they became kin.

More on Lost and the social psychology of conflict later this week.

Insight from the academics at Concurring Opinions' post on PERCEPTIONS IN LITIGATION AND MEDIATION: LAWYERS, DEFENDANTS, PLAINTIFFS AND GENDERED PARTIES (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2009. Post by  Tamara Relis. Image from Legal Blog Watch.

[P]laintiffs’ articulations of their litigation objectives rarely correlated with legal actors’ perceptions.

In fact, a regular and conspicuous occurrence was the failure to mention financial compensation as an objective at all unless probed (occurring in 65% of interviews).

Instead, what plaintiffs recurrently repeatedly was a lexicon of non-fiscal, extra-legal objectives for litigation. The issue of ‘principle’ was prominent for plaintiffs as revealed in the various objectives they passionately spoke about. ‘It’s not about the money’ was a recurrent theme throughout. Many of the comments concerned dignity and respect after the injury, inability to be heard, refusal to listen, dismissal and victim blaming.

Moreover, plaintiffs’ extra-legal objectives did not appear to be affected by the passage of time, as there were no marked disparities in the way plaintiffs spoke of why they sued and what they wanted from the civil justice system as between plaintiffs who had commenced litigation three to four months earlier (interviewed subsequent to court-mandatory mediations) and claimants who had been litigating for several years (interviewed after voluntary mediations of cases already on trial lists).

Here are the results from the question:  what are your aims in mediation?

The disparity in mediation aims of plaintiffs and plaintiff lawyers revealed important differences in what each planned for mediation in terms of how to resolve the same case.  Other than wanting settlement, the mediation objectives of plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ lawyers were diverse in all categories. For instance, though some plaintiff lawyers noted their clients wanted defendants to admit fault (37%), regardless of feasibility not a single one sought this at mediation. In comparison, virtually all plaintiffs (94%) sought fault admissions at mediation. Similarly, plaintiff lawyers never mentioned wanting to hear defendants’ explanations of the disputed incidents. Again this was something that most plaintiffs desired (71%). Finally, as compared with the bulk of claimants (88%) who sought apologies at mediation, only a minority (32%) of plaintiff lawyers did (though almost half remarked that apologies were important for their clients).

For more charts, data and analysis, see the incredibly useful post over at Concurring Opinions here.

From Privilege Clouds Judgment at Indexed.