. . . and the Supreme Court has it. Check out The Female Factor over at Slate (excerpt below):
Social scientists contend that the difference is more than just cosmetic. They cite a 2006 study by the Wellesley Centers for Women that found three to be the magic number when it came to the impact of having women on corporate boards: After the third woman is seated, boards reach a tipping point at which the group as a whole begins to function differently. According to Sumru Erkut, one of the authors of that study, the small group as a whole becomes more collaborative and more open to different perspectives. In no small part, she writes, that's because once a critical mass of three women is achieved on a board, it's more likely that all of the women will be heard. In other words, it's not that females bring any kind of unitary women's perspective to the board—there's precious little evidence that women think fundamentally differently from men about business or law—but that if you seat enough women, the question of whether women deserve the seat finally goes away. And women claim they are finally able to speak openly when they don't feel their own voice is meant to be the voice of all women.
Over at She Negotiates, we use the power of women to support, encourage, cheer and brainstorm in every class we offer, with the greatest power coming to and from our post-graduate Negotiation Master Classes which are limited to only four women. For additional information about how you can use woman-power to improve your bottom line, contact either Lisa or Vickie using our contact form or catch either one of us at our direct numbers.
This isn't about gender-war, this is about human peace and prosperity!
One last time!! before the door closes on the opportunity to have your picture in the WLALA Tribute book and to share two tables with your fellow neutrals at the WLALA annual Installation Dinner and Gala.
I have three more places at the table and on that ad. I need your check for $175 and a .jpg by Friday to put you in it! Please, let's show WLALA how eager we are to cross-refer business.
This is a particularly good year to join us as we begin the first WLALA ADR initiative in its nearly 100 year history.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS! of women lawyers - way past time to reach and firmly occupy the higher reaches of the profession. We've been graduating from the nation's law schools in nearly equal numbers with men for more than 20 years. My own U.C. law school class (King Hall, '80) was 50% women thirty years ago.
The ADR pipeline is full of competent -- indeed glorious -- women. Yet the statistics at the top remain grim.
Chopped Liver?
Why is your ADR practice not everything that Tony Piazza's or Eric Green's or even Steve Cerveris' is? Research shows that both men and women have negative implicit attitudes toward women in leadership and authority positions. The good news is that women are slightly less pre-disposed than are men to picture a man in a suit when they're looking for access to money and power. I've had at least half a dozen women commercial litigators look straight at me and say "I don't know any women mediators."
Huh????
Followed by, "well their names are never on the lists [circulated in my firm]."
Women, with their slightly reduced inability to "see" women in authority positions, are our foot in the door. And the new WLALA ADR Committee is our opportunity to open that door wide.
As a member of the CPR-led Joint Task Force on Diversity, I have heard the verdict of JAMS and the AAA. "The market has spoken. Commercial lawyers just don't hire women and minorities."
What????
We're advocates, for goodness sakes. When we come into town we have to register our skills of persuasion with local law enforcement authorities. We're change agents, opinion makers, powerful holders of the keys to the kingdom.
And the market has spoken? We make the market!
This year's ADR Committee is dedicated to closing the gaping void between men and women neutrals. We're not going to ask for special treatment, picket the LASC's ADR office, pass new laws or burn our ADR certificates, Super Lawyer plaques, Ivy League diplomas, or our bras (not at this age!).
We're going to market like no one has ever marketed before and we're going to do so as a group so that we don't each hesitate, as we women tend to do, to promote ourselves and our services.
2010 and 2011 will be the years in which top women will refer to other top women. 2010 and 2011 will be the years in which we close the income gap not only between men and women neutrals but between men and women lawyers (its 40% at the top). 2010 and 2011 will be the years in which we make a market younger women lawyers will be entering in the next decade and the one after that -- one in which they'll flourish after they grow weary of fighting over interrogatory objections and e-discovery.
How?
Marketing. Proctor and Gamble does not say, "well, the market doesn't want a new improved laundry detergent." P&G asks "how?" not "can we?" And it certainly never says "we give up, the market has spoken."
We're putting our first stake in the ground on September 16 at the WLALA Gala. There's no event more important for women neutrals to attend this year.
Our current attendees will appear in two full-page ads in the Tribute Book and two color flyers to be distributed at the dinner.
To date those women are Eleanor Barr, Joan Kessler, Lynne Bassis, Katherine Edwards, Laurel Kaufer, Linda Klibanow, Denise Madigan, Stephanie Maloney, Deborah Rothman, Jan Frankel Schau, Gretchen Taylor, Caroline Vincent, Diane Wayne, Linda Bulmash, Lisa Gates (my She Negotiates business partner), Kathy Balin, and Erica Bristol.
We need three more women neutrals to fill table two. If you want to sit at another table, ask a woman litigator to change places with you while whispering "cross-refer" in her ear. The key is that you'll be there to network. You'll show your support to WLALA by showing up and WLALA women (among the most entrepreneurial in the Bar) will see your beautiful face and panel affiliation or business name in the Tribute Book while enduring the inevitably tedious speeches at these events.
Do you want to double your income by 2012? If we've lasted this long in a profession that was solidly male when so many of us were in high school, we can close this gap by coming together and just doing it.
And if the $175 is too steep a price during these recessionary times or if you'll be out of town or otherwise engaged on the 16th of September, please let me know that you want to be a member of the new WLALA Committee by return email.
Our first event will be an afternoon on arbitration in October with CPR CEO Kathy Bryan and other powerful women attorneys, GC's and CEO's who arbitrate, either as advocates, as clients or as arbitrators. The panel will be moderated by complex-commercial AAA arbitrator Deborah Rothman.
Shock me! Let's fill Table Three!!
I look forward to hearing from you and to kicking the last pitiful shards out of that darn glass ceiling.
Wow! Does any general counsel in the land truly not know this? Here's the law.com headline - with emphasis, mind you, as if gold had been discovered in them thar hills.
Law firms' corporate clients are not created equal, if billing rates are any indication.
Firms are charging different hourly rates to different clients for doing similar work, according to an analysis of more than $4 billion in law firm billings that will be released in September.
Differences in billing rates are just some of the preliminary findings in the "Real Rate Report" by CT TyMetrix and The Corporate Executive Board. The report examines billing from more than 4,000 law firms, 50,000 individual billers, and 18.9 million invoice items from 2007 to 2009.
The data was collected from CT TyMetrix's clients. Law firms and corporate legal departments have been using the company's web-based financial and e-commerce software to handle ebilling and matter management for more than 10 years. About $30 billion in legal invoices have flowed through the company's systems, said Julie Peck, vice president of corporate strategy and market development at CT TyMetrix.
And the results of the report, once released, will be aimed at helping general counsel make better decisions about how and where to spend their money. The findings will be broken down by several factors, including geography, law firm size, staffing, and the types of matters handled.
"It will give general counsel an enormous amount of bargaining power," Peck said.
We’re celebrating Mothers Day by posting Blawg Review #263 at the She Negotiates Blogfor one obvious and some not so obvious reasons. The obvious reason is the word “She.” The not-so-obvious reasons are: (1) Mother’s Day was a peace and reconciliation movement before it was a holiday; and, (2) peace exists only when we have the political will to seek and the negotiation tools achieve the resolution of conflict.
The following article is a must-read for these economically challenging times. Excerpt below and link to entire article at end of excerpt. This also works for consultants, attorneys, trainers, mediators, and anyone else who is marketing their services to clients.
The woman was interviewing for a lucrative position as director of a sales team. After having three great meetings full of lively conversation about how she'd handle the job, she was optimistic. But then came the fourth and final interview, with the company's executive vice president. Things were going swimmingly until the interviewee asked a question designed to lock in the offer: "Do you have any issues with my candidacy?"
"Frankly, yes," the executive replied. "You're good with people, but you don't have the analytic background we need. Not only would you need to steer the sales team, but you'd need to analyze information and data too." Shocked, the woman left the meeting realizing the offer she'd thought was in the bag was gone.
In a high-pressure job search, is it ever possible to turn a no into a yes?
Absolutely, says Robert Hellmann, a career coach at the Five O'Clock Club, a career counseling firm, who also teaches career development at New York University. Hellmann was coaching that very woman, and he helped her turn the situation around.
After every job interview, Hellmann advises, you should write not a thank-you note but what he calls an "influence letter." In this case, that letter became his client's key to getting back into the running
The letter should always address the conversation you've had and your skills and experience. First, in the interview, you should ask what challenges the company is facing and what the new hire will need to do as soon as she starts work. In the influence letter, address those challenges concretely, ideally by describing similar challenges you've tackled at a previous job and how you handled them.
I make these presentations because people ask me all the time how to use and maximize the value of social networking to build their businesses. This presentation includes a YouTube video on building a network with Facebook Fan PagesSocial Networking 101
Once again, based upon my personal experience and that of tens of thousands of other women in commercial legal practice I continue to believe that until we are fairly represented on commercial ADR panels, both arbitration and mediation, we cannot expect significant change. This may happen as a matter of the natural "aging" process of the field. The ADR field looks now exactly like the legal field looked to me when I entered it in 1980. Not surprising given the fact that ADR is historically a "retirement" field. That is already changing, to beneficial effect.
For the adventuresome, Peter's pro-active recommendations below. I highly recommend, by the way, that you follow Peter's Business Conflict Blog. It's one of the best out there.
(screen shot of google search for our local legal rag's "top 50 neutrals)
■ What if the country’s leading law firms—from which so many of our leading mediators and arbitrators emerge—had an incentive to encourage more diverse members of the firm to enter this field?
■ What if a benchmark survey were conducted to determine how often law firms suggest mediation to their clients; how often mediation is in fact tried; and how often diverse mediators are proposed to clients by outside lawyers and ADR provider organizations?
■ What if the property casualty insurance industry, as the largest consumer of legal services and of ADR services, conveyed its expectation that the firms that insurers pay for, when they propose mediators and arbitrators, will be expected to propose diverse individuals?
■ What if influential national ADR organizations combined forces to better reflect their corporate and legal constituents, and meet their customers’ expectations, by sharing information on excellent women and minorities who are not now on their lists, but should be?
■ What if initiatives were undertaken to encourage particularly promising women, younger people and minorities from firms to attend ADR colloquia, seminars and other events in order to network, learn and advance their visibility and recognition among the ADR community, as well as to contribute diverse views and perspectives?
■ What if a mentor program were designed and funded, pursuant to which younger female and minority attorneys could “shadow” established mediators and arbitrators (whether or not they are women or minorities) and establish skills and reputations thereby?
■ What if corporations and law firms intentionally engaged younger mediators who are women and minorities in smaller matters, so that those professionals would gain experience as neutrals and be better positioned for the larger cases?
■ What if scholarships were established to enable young people to be trained as mediators and arbitrators, with the expectation that a person thus trained would be skilled not only as a neutral, but more generally as a negotiator and client representative in settlement?
■ What if a very “early pipeline” were begun, and ADR institutions worked with Street Law Inc. (www.streetlaw.com), a national program that trains high school students in legal issues, or a similar organization to provide materials and information for children to become interested in ADR as a profession?
It is perplexing that this one aspect of the legal profession—a field that is otherwise so robust, so progressive and so creative—lags behind so miserably in satisfying client expectations for diverse practitioners. But there is no indication that it must be so. And with diligence, creativity and practical action, it will not long be so.
(image from EdTechPost : note on graph: it doesn't have to be like this. Twitter is a tool that can be used strategically as part of your marketing plan for a long, long time and it constantly gets better as the people who do these things build applications and as twitter adds new features; this is completely accurate about the start-up however)
Dear New Web 2.0 Attorney Inhabitant,
Welcome to the Island! Here are a few of its founding principles and folkways:
the natives are friendly networkers who want to share their interests; their friends; their colleagues; their knowledge; and, their experience with you;
you may inhabit any part of the Island and as much of it as you wish; there are no borders here;
no one is interested in your bio here; they want to get to know who you really are; if they're sufficiently interested in that (because you're engaging, friendly, helpful and authentic) they'll eventually get around to asking you what you do for a living (most of them will have intuited it from your interests, however, and won't need to ask);
your primary purpose on the Island is to be of service to others;
play nice;
the Island doesn't require you to do anything - you may visit it and its inhabitants whenever you please; it is not your demanding, insistent, annoying, taxing "in" box; it is not email;
the island boasts educational institutions (law blogs, for instance, and at least one legal University - Solo Practice U); bar associations (Commercial Arbitrators and Mediators and Patent and Intellectual Property Practitioners); exhibit halls (I've set up a booth to sell my book here); help desks staffed by professionals and CEO's (at LinkedIn here); playgrounds (Facebook, depending upon how you choose to use it); and, a lovely river right outside of town that you can wander over to watch, in which to fish for information, or, onto which you can launch a boat of any type, size or design - twitter).
Here are some helpful hints if you want to visit the Island's river - Twitter.
UNLOCK YOUR DOOR. Nothing says "I'm not interested in you" like a velvet rope. Twitter, like all of web 2.0 is fanatically democratic. If you get people in your network you don't want there (the Thai girls who want your sex-trade biz) you can simply block them.
to get started on twitter, amble on over to the twitter boat house of someone you trust and respect; follow everyone they follow unless they're following more than 500 people, in which case follow the people on their twitter "lists" (my list of must follow legal and other people is here).
just watch the river for awhile. Then retweet something someone says that interests you; the rest will follow.
remember who you are on this river - an attorney who specializes in employment law, for instance - and "tweet" consistently with your identity, remembering that you can and should socialize; provide value 90% of the time (linking, retweeting) and promote yourself 5% of the time (MAX).
don't wait to understand twitter-river before downloading tweetdeck. Use it. It's free. It's easy.
Remember what Malcolm Gladwell said in the Tipping Point.
Your first degree connections (you/me) will bring you the least amount of new business because you already know them and have presumably maximized their value to you (that sounds harsh; it's not, but if I added heart, this post would be way, way too long).
Your most distant connections bring you the most work because you may be the only lawyer they know. Although the people I know (lots of lawyers) might be good for your business, the people who know the people I know and the people who know them will ultimately be of the most value to you.
When asked whether the announcement of my affiliation with ADR Services, Inc. could be sent to my WLALA mailing list, I was told: women don't refer! Huh?
In 2006, I formed the Professional Women's Network of Southern California for women executives, managers, professionals, and, entrepreneurs. We now have more than 600 members spread across three social networking platforms LinkedIn (here); Meetup (here, here and here), and, ning (our true "home" here).
If women are in a position to refer, they refer. And if they're in a position to refer to one another, they refer to one another. Some women's initiatives at some major national law firms, for instance, have permitted women associates and partners to by-pass the normal intra-firm cross-marketing connectors (mainly male practice group leaders) and instead refer to the women in far-flung geographic regions who have gotten to know one anothers' specialty practices and strengths as advocates through monthly women initiative or women affinity group meetings.
If women -- the most collaborative gender, if I may be so bold -- don't refer, it's not because they don't want to. It's because there are still too few of them in positions that permit them to refer.
The Professional Women's Network is out to change all that. If you'd like to be part of Women 2.0, please consider joining the Professional Women's Networks of Southern or Northern Cailfornia today. It's free; it's fun; and, it's powerful.
My own personal 200-year present spans the life of my maternal grandparents who were nine years old in 1909, and that of my step-children’s children, who (assuming they procreate on a reasonable schedule) should be ninety-five'ish in 2109. [1]
asked here whether the shiny, flying, silver Jiffy Pop-looking craft tethered in the backyard of Richard Heene was an "attractive nuisance" under the law.
My imagined grandchildren, [6] born sometime between today and 2014, will not be strangers to any of my grandfather’s technologies. Despite the advent of compact fluorescent light bulbs, the early lives of my step-children's children will likely pass under the glow of the same incandescent lights that brightened granddad’s one-room school house. They will be transported to school in cars with internal combustion engines, learn the same alphabet from the same cardboard and paper books (as well as from the "e" variety) [7] and play many of the same games[8] he did – hop scotch, jump rope and ring-around the rosy.
Change will etch itself into the lives of my grandchildren as surely as it did my own, my parents' and my grandparents'. Hybrids will give way to fully electric (and perhaps hemp-powered)[9] vehicles (effective or defective) and though electricity will continue to be generated by hydroelectric dams, wind farms and nuclear power plants, some new and unimaginable source of power will surely push back the nights of my grand children's children. [10]
Law, politics, society and culture also exist in the 200-year present of conflict resolution.[11] In my personal 200-year span, the law seems to have changed the most profoundly. Was it the law first and culture later? Or do they weave our future together?
The first U.S. woman lawyer, Myra Bradwell, was admitted to practice a mere ten years before my grandmother was born. Mrs. Bradwell’s legal career was the subject of one of the sorriest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, in which the Court opined,
The civil law as well as nature itself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say the identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea for a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband … for these reasons I think that the laws of Illinois now complained of are not obnoxious to the charge of any abridging any of the privileges and immunities of cities of the United States.
Another nineteen years would pass after Bradwell began her practice before she (and my nineteen year old grandmother) were guaranteed the right to vote. [13] And another 30 years would pass after my women's movement -- the Second Wave -- before we'd have our own business magazine - ForbesWoman (my part in it here). And let us not forget that despite the 20th Century's great civil rights achievements, when America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia. See e.g. Problems All Around for Blacks in Big Law at Being a Black Lawyer.
My grandparents', parents' and step-children's 20th Century was dominated by genocide[14] on a scale and a technological precision unimaginable to our earlier forebears. Mid-century brought with it the threat of nuclear annihilation but also liberated millions of people enslaved by colonialism. We cured polio in my own lifetime with both "dead" and "live" vaccines (neither of them counterfeit) - a singular moment in scientific history during which no one took ownership of the cure and no one tried to stop others from seeking another, a problem Patently O addressed this week in Reverse Payments.
Whether god or satan, heaven or hell, war or peace "won" the twentieth century, the world's greatest peace-making body was created during it -- the United Nations. And here in the U.S., the “living room war,” Viet Nam, coupled with the largest generation of adolescents ever to grace American society, ended the forcible induction of young men into the military. [15]
With the recent discovery of our earliest ancestor, Ardi, our biological and social lives exist in a 4.4 million year now. Our physical bodies “evolve” in the womb along the same lines as did our species and, once born, we carry with us our earliest organs. [16] Most critical of these to conflict escalation and avoidance is our “fight-flight” mechanism – the amygdala.[17] And the most pertinent biological agents to promote the collaborative resolution of conflict are our “mirror neurons” which
provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture . . . absorb[ing] it directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation.
How we’ve manage to survive despite our tendency to misread one another’s actions, intentions and emotions, is often the subject of those who advise us how to choose and move juries -- here -- Anne Reed at Deliberations (explaining why "they" don't see things like "we" do here); and, the Jury Room (explaining why pain hurts more intensely when we believe it's been intentionally inflicted here).
The Most Effective Conflict Resolution Technology is the Oldest
One of our true original gangsters, Al Capone, is reported to have said that “you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone” and one of our greatest Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt said “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
As Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal explained, had Tit for Tat been tossed into the game with 50 steadfast non-cooperators, there would have been a 49-way tie for first place. But none of the players' programs failed to cooperate in at least some circumstances, leaving Tit for Tat the clear victor. According to Wright, humans, like the programs in Axelrod's competition, are evolutionarily “designed” to cooperate under at least some circumstances. The engine and benefit of cooperation is present in our neurochemistry. When scientists observed the brain activity of volunteers playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, for instance, they found that the participants' “reward circuits” were activated and their impulsive "me first" circuits inhibited when they cooperated. Cooperation, retaliation, forgiveness and a return to cooperation. Tit for Tat.
We don't "dis" lawyers here at the Negotiation Blog. We simply remind ourselves that our primary purpose is the promotion of justice, with a stable societal order closely behind. Most people don't understand, for instance, that Shakespeare's famous the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyerswas not an insult. In King Henry IV, Act IV, Scene II, Shakespeare's sentiment was not his own, but that of a revolutionary who wished to destroy the social order.
The historic "present" of laws and lawyers is in the thousands, not simply the hundreds, of years. Hammurabi (make of his choice for the memorialization of his laws what you will) was the sixth king of Babylon, remembered for creating -- in his own name (and likeness?) - the first written and systematic legal code.
For the wrongful killing of another, for instance, the victim’s kin were paid according to the social status of the deceased party. Thus the ‘man price’ for killing a peasant was 200 shillings and that for a nobleman 1200 shillings. Payments were not, however, tailored to the loss, but fixed according to types of affront, a distinction we continue to make when we punish intentional torts more severely than negligent ones. [24]
Lawyers, litigators and trial lawyers are too often demonized by the ADR community as if you could get someone to sit down to negotiate without first pointing the gun of litigation at their heads; I salute you (and myself, for that matter!) for bringing us all to the bargaining table. See Steve Mehta's recent post at Mediation Matters, Factors When Peace Makes Sense for a note that touches upon the symbiotic relationship between litigation and mediation, litigators and mediators.
I shouldn't cite single legal blogs twice, but I cannot resist this quote of Scott Greenfield's on another pundit's view of the future lawyers have in store for them, i.e.,
shucking oysters for a living if we don't accept a future of lawyers being piece workers in factories, sending our work off to Bangalore in pdf files and complementing people on their choice of forms at Legal Zoom.
Which came first? Public civil trials or private arbitrations? You’ll be surprised, I’ll wager, to hear that arbitration was one of the earliest forms of dispute resolution, practiced by the juris consults of the Roman Empire. Roman arbitration predates the adversarial system of common law by more than a thousand years. [25]
Ah, the glory of Rome! The juris consulti were (like too many mediators) amateurs who dabbled in dispute resolution, raising the question whether they (and we) should be certified or regulated as Diane Levin asks at The Mediation Channel this week. The Roman hobbyists gave legal opinions (responsa) to all comers (a practice known as publice respondere). They also served the needs of Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with advisory panels of jurisconsults before rendering decisions. Thus, the Romans – god bless them! - were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems (an activity some readers will recall Ralph Nader calling "mental gymnastics in an iron cage").
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (Inevitably Polarizing) Adversarial System
It was Buckminster Fuller who famously opined that the "significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." If you keep this aphorism in mind for the remainder of this post, you'll likely have some extraordinarily innovative comments to make in the comment section below.
As the Law Guru wiki reminds us, we can trace the adversarial system to the "medieval mode of trial by combat, in which some litigants were allowed a champion to represent them." We owe our present day adversarialism, however, to the common law's use of the jury - the power of argumentation replacing the power of the sword.
The Act abolishing the infamous Star Chamber in 1641 also granted every "freeman" the right to trial by "lawful judgment of his peers" or by the "law of the land" before the Crown could "take[] or imprison[]" him or "disseis[e] [him] of his freehold or liberties, or free customs." Nor could he any longer be "outlawed or exciled or otherwise destroyed." Nor could the King "pass upon him or condemn him."
English colonies like our own adopted the jury trial system and we, of course, enshrined that system in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments. Whether this 17th century dispute resolution technology can be fine-tuned to keep abreast of 21st century dispute creation technology (particularly in the quickly moving area of intellectual property) remains one of the pressing questions of legal and ADR policy and practice, particularly in a week in which a Superior Court verbally punished the lawyers before it for filing The Most Oppressive Motion Ever Presented (see the Laconic Law Blog). The motion?
Defendants['] . . . motion for summary judgment/summary adjudication, seeking adjudication of 44 issues, most of which were not proper subjects of adjudication. Defendants’ separate statement was 196 pages long, setting forth hundreds of facts, many of them not material—as defendants’ own papers conceded. And the moving papers concluded with a request for judicial notice of 174 pages. All told, defendants’ moving papers were 1056 pages.
Mediator, author and activist, Ken Cloke, suggests that interest-based resolutions to conflict must replace power and rights based resolutions if we expect to create a future in which justice prevails. As Ken wrote in Conflict Revolution:
Approaching evil and injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to them, extending compassion even to those who were responsible for evils or injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage adversaries to work collaboratively to satisfy their interests.
Evil and injustice can therefore be considered byproducts of reliance on power or rights, and failures or refusals to learn and evolve.
All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures, and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are adversarial and unstable, and therefore avoid, deny, resist, and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they were treated unjustly and contemplating evil in response.
As pressures to change increase, these systems must either adapt, or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to promote change, delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based systems are fully able to seek out their weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning, and celebrate those who brought them to their attention.
These are the words I leave with the readers of Blawg Review #234 because they are the ones that informed my personal and professional transformation from a legal career based on rights and remedies to one based upon interests and consensus.
Whatever my own personal 200-year present was, is and will be, it is pointed in the direction of peace with justice, with an enormous and probably unwarranted optimism best expressed by the man after whom my law school was named: Martin Luther King, Jr. - the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. Next week's host, Counsel to Counsel, will devote its round-up of the week's best legal posts to the Great Recession.
[16] Earlier scientific theory posited that each human embryo (see Embryo Mix-Up at the Proud Parenting Blog) passes through a progression of abbreviated stages that resemble the main evolutionary stages of its ancestors, i.e., that the fertilized egg starts as a single cell (just like our first living evolutionary ancestor); as the egg repeatedly divides it develops into an embryo with a segmented arrangement (the “worm” stage); these segments develop into vertebrae, muscles and something that sort of looks like gills (the “fish” stage); limb buds develop with paddle-like hands and feet, and there appears to be a “tail” (the “amphibian” stage); and, by the eighth week of development, most organs are nearly complete, the limbs develop fingers and toes, and the “tail” disappears (the human stage). It turns out that this one-to-one correlation was too simplistic, but it remains safe to say that our biological development still passes through several stages that “recapitulate” the evolution of our species.
[17] The amygdala is a region of the brain that permits the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. It permits us to “read” the emotional responses of our fellows and is thought to facilitated our ability to form relationships and live and work in groups. It is also the source of our “fight or flight” response to danger.
Studies show that some mirror neurons fire when a person reaches for a glass or watches someone else reach for a glass; others fire when the person puts the glass down and still others fire when the person reaches for a toothbrush and so on. They respond when someone kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked and says or hears the word "kick."
“When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain,” said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. ”Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate,” he said. ”But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements. “
[22] Looking toward the future, the Neuroethics and the Law Blog predicts that in the “experiential future, we will have better technologies to measure physical pain, pain relief, and emotional distress. These technologies should not only change tort law and related compensation schemes but should also change our assessments of criminal blameworthiness and punishment severity” here.
The adversarial system of medical negligence fails to satisfy the main aims of tort law, those being equitable compensation of plaintiffs, correction of mistakes and deterrence of negligence. Instead doctors experience litigation as a punishment and, in order to avoid exposure to the system, have resorted not to corrective or educational measures but to defensive medicine, a practice which the evidence indicates both decreases patient autonomy and increases iatrogenic injury.
(Iatrogenic, by the way, is a fancy term for “we have know idea whatsoever what the source of this ailment is). Chris is looking for comments so run on over there if you’ve been thinking about medical malpractice litigation during the marathon American health care debates.
From Diana Skaggs'
Louisville Divorce Law Journal -
"In browsing [Victoria's ADR blogs] you'll no doubt stumble upon some
information that will make you wonder how you could have practiced law
without it. Subscribe to the feeds and you'll regularly receive some of the
best CLE on the net. I wish it were required reading for all mediators."
I'm an attorney who is currently a Masters Degree candidate in
Mediation and Conflict Studies. I do not have much time to read
blogs. Thanks to the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog, I do not need
to. Your posts possess the perfect blend of thought-provoking
content and practical tools for anyone working in the trenches of
dispute resolution. I look forward to reading the blog because I
know its content will always be highly relevant to the issues I
grapple with, both as an attorney and as a mediator. Thank you for
providing us with such a great free resource. - Juliana Hoyt,
attorney and mediation student, Vermont.
Social scientists contend that the difference is more than just cosmetic. They cite a 2006 study by the Wellesley Centers for Women that found three to be the magic number when it came to the impact of having women on corporate boards: After the third woman is seated, boards reach a tipping point at which the group as a whole begins to function differently. According to Sumru Erkut, one of the authors of that study, the small group as a whole becomes more collaborative and more open to different perspectives. In no small part, she writes, that's because once a critical mass of three women is achieved on a board, it's more likely that all of the women will be heard. In other words, it's not that females bring any kind of unitary women's perspective to the board—there's precious little evidence that women think fundamentally differently from men about business or law—but that if you seat enough women, the question of whether women deserve the seat finally goes away. And women claim they are finally able to speak openly when they don't feel their own voice is meant to be the voice of all women.
2010 and 2011 will be the years in which top women will refer to other top women. 2010 and 2011 will be the years in which we close the income gap not only between men and women neutrals but between men and women lawyers (its 40% at the top). 2010 and 2011 will be the years in which we make a market younger women lawyers will be entering in the next decade and the one after that -- one in which they'll flourish after they grow weary of fighting over interrogatory objections and e-discovery.
And if the $175 is too steep a price during these recessionary times or if you'll be out of town or otherwise engaged on the 16th of September, please let me know that you want to be a member of the new WLALA Committee by return email.
There is a lot going on for women attorneys' business development these days, particularly at the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles (check out this November 17 all-day event: 
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My 
First and most importantly, I suppose, are the
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (