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Sociologist Elise Boulding has said that we live in a “200 year present,” a “social space which reaches into the past and into the future” -- a space in which “we can move around directly in our own lives and indirectly by touching the lives of the young and old around us.” Miall, Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, Contemporary Conflict Resolution.

What does the 200-year present have to do with conflict resolution week?  It reminds us that new forms never really completely replace the old ones.  We continue to employ every technique we've ever used to suppress, avoid, deny, resolve, transform, or transcend conflict, including force (violent and non-violent such as injunctions subject of a Trial Warrior Blog post this week); thievery (the Trade Secrets Blog); shaming (which Scott Greenfield does to bloggers "looking for fights and dumb as dirt" and which Volokh suggests we do to health insurers); bullying (solutions to which appear at the Citizen Media Law Project); torture (still with us at the Crim Prof Blog); cheating (Make Yourself Better with Their Secrets at Concretely Ambiguous) ingratiation (at the Law School Expert); persuasive argumentation; appeal to third party authority; bargaining; communication; and, problem solving (The Tao of Advice at the Business of Creativity). 

Whichever dispute resolution mechanism you use, it should be much improved if you take up  juggling (as reported this week at Idealawg).

Transformative conflict resolution of the type covered by New York City police officer, Jeff Thompson at Enjoy Mediation, requires accountability (by lawyers, for instance, to the principle of justice at Law21); recognition (at JD Bliss); apology, amends, reconciliation (at Opinio Juris); power with (negotiation and cooperation at the Ohio Family Law Blog) instead of power over (at the Election Law Blog); and, interests rather than rights (at the Gay Couples Law Blog).

No brand of law-giver or enforcer has ever entirely left the scene.  Cops, negotiators, mediators (on the international scene at the Business Conflict Blog); conciliators, arbitrators, trial attorneys (marking tattoos as exhibits over at LawComix), corporate lawyers, legislators  (fomenting a Franken Amendment at the ADR Prof Blawg); judges (whether elected or appointed at Legally Unbound), and, juries (who might be biased at SCOTUS Blog). 

And of course the gadflies (wolf protection lawsuits anyone? at  Point of Law). 

Win, lose, settle, enjoin (at Charon QC) or simply give up (6 Ways We Gave Up Our Privacy at CSO Security and Risk).  We regulate crime and prescribe punishment (Polanski at Sentencing Law and Policy and The End of an Era at Defending People). 

We wage war (at Prawfs Blog) and seek peace (at the Delaware Employment Law Blog) as conflict inevitably erupts over Obama's (embarrassing) peace prize (at Balkinization).

And, lest we forget our primary purpose, we bend our efforts toward justice (which, according to BLT is not necessarily available to card-carrying members of the ACLU).

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]

My grandfather, born in 1900, witnessed the birth of electricity, saw the first automobile roll off an assembly line [2] and stood awestruck in a cornfield as one of mankind’s first airplanes took flight. [3]  Although we've progressed from bi-planes to jets and rockets (some of which may someday be green) we still fly balloons of the type first launched in 1783 -- both Goodyear Blimps and the backyard variety, covered this week by Legal Blog Watch as Law and More

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.

Grandpa's first war was, well, the First and his second was the Second,[4]  as if there'd never been any wars before the Great One. By the time I was born, mid-century, we'd fought the war to end all wars twice and knew we'd never survive a third. 

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.

[12]

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.

 [18]

As “exquisitely social creatures,” our “survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.” Id. That our misunderstandings and cognitive biases -- mentioned by Volokh on Paternalism and Michael Carbone on reactive devaluation at Mediation Strategies this week -- threaten our survival as a species is undeniable (cf. Lawyers Must Survive or Face Extinction at the Lawyerist). 

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.”

Capone and Roosevelt didn't know it, but they were talking about the most effective (and most ancient) form of conflict resolution – tit for tat. In 1980, political Scientist Robert Axelrod asked game theory experts to submit computer programs designed to prevail in a game that provided the highest reward to cooperating pairs -- the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. (See also Max Kennerly's excellent post on Game Theory and Medical Malpractice Settlements at the Philadelphia Litigation and Trial Blog).

The winner of Axelrod's competition was a program named tit for tat.  Tit for tat was programmed to cooperate [19]  with its first encounter with any other programmed player.  It  rewarded cooperation with cooperation (just as networking will reward the savvy lawyer over at Chuck Newton's Ride the Third Wave) and punished non-cooperation with retaliation. Because Tit for Tat retaliated in the face of non-cooperation (just as a former employee did according to Hell Hath No Fury at Chicago Law Blogger) it was never repeatedly victimized. And because Tit for Tat “forgave” non-cooperators upon their return to cooperative game playing (as some believe Mr. Polanski should be forgiven over at the Marquette U. Law School Faculty Blog) it never got locked into mutually costly chains of mutual betrayal. [20]

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. 

Laws and Lawyers

First and most importantly, I suppose, are the social media signs that you're "tweeting" like a lawyer over at the Social Media Law Student Blog.  Why first or important?  Know thyself.  Everything else follows that.

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 lawyers was 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. 

These laws provided for a mix of physical punishment - 60 lashes with an ox hide whip - ‘measure for measure’ awards (still with us in the form of lethal injection as covered by The StandDown Texas Project) – eye for eye, bone fracture for bone fracture – and monetary compensation – 20 shekels for tooth injuries – (preserved by workplace injury awards such as those discussed at the Workers Compensation Blog) depended not only upon the type of injury, but the social classes involved in the loss, i.e., ‘measure for measure’ sanctions were specified for losses among the upper classes while monetary awards were required for losses caused to and by commoners (reminding us that disrespect still too often turns on social status or "outsider" classification as discussed at Balkinization this week).  [23] 

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]

Criminal law and civil, it all comes down to a process that is "due" (a topic covered in a blistering post about tea-partiers and other "protectors" of the Constitution at the Criminal Jurisdiction Law Blog) and a set of guidelines against which we can exercise some small degree of control over our own commercial and personal futures (like those subject of Delays Not "Party Time, Excellent" for Subcontractor at the Construction Contract Review).

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.

Legal Rebels:  the Sky is Falling at Simple Justice.  Charon QC also weighs in on the ABA Legal Rebels project here.

Arbitration

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.

Id. (and ouch!)  On a less Dickensian note (think Bleak House) take a look at the IP Maximizer's post on IP litigation not being smart source of revenue for inventors. 

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.

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Let's be clear about one thing.  Mediators are not human Switzerlands. 

We have opinions, often strong ones, about issues like the rule of law in America, negotiated resolutions to intractable conflicts, the proper role of force against another sovereign nation and whether torture is a tool Americans ought to be using in the name of national security.  

Because we mediators spend so much time listening to litigants' competing stories of right and wrong, I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that we "get" the great gray expanses that separate fear from understanding, anger from compassion and "the truth" from one's subjective experience of it.

What motivated this post was a recent challenge to a mediator's "right" to express his political beliefs in a mediation forum.  "You're supposed to be neutral," said the challenger.  "It's wrong and unprofessional to express your political beliefs here."

As the Presidential election nears, I want to clarify my own views on mediation neutrality, particularly my belief that we mediators do and should leave our neutrality when we close the mediation room door. Neither I, nor this blog, is "neutral" about the upcoming election.  I am actively campaigning to elect Barack Obama because I believe he is best suited to withdraw our troops from Iraq, reconcile ourselves with the world community, respond to conflict as a negotiator rather than as a conquerer would, and restore the damage done by the Bush administration to the rule of law in America.  If I cannot say this because I am fearful of offending some of my readers or concerned that some potential clients will choose not to use my services, I would count myself unworthy of the freedoms fought for by those who came before us.    

What it Means to Be an ADR "Neutral"   

Though there is disagreement among scholars about the precise nature of "mediation neutrality," a recent article on the subject at BeyondIntractability.com expresses my own view.  That article quotes negotiation gurus Kevin Gibson, Leigh Thompson, and Max Bazerman on the three distinct types of neutrality that mediators can and do practice.    

• Neutrality as impartiality, which holds that the mediator should be free of bias and should set aside his or her opinions, feelings, and agendas;

• Neutrality as equidistance, which focuses on the idea that mediators should try to give equal consideration to each side; and, 

• Neutrality as a practice in discourse.

These theorists believe, as do I, that it is part of a mediator's job to assist the parties in framing the problems and to lend guidance in expressing their tales of injustice to one another.   The mediator, say these scholars,  

gives each side a chance to talk about their positions and concerns, and then reframes these issues in a more neutral way so that parties are more likely to listen to and understand the other side's viewpoint[, t]hne helps the parties . . . explore settlement options and to move toward a solution that all can agree on.

Neutrality from this viewpoint "means that the mediator who facilitates this discussion should not have an interest in advancing the goals and positions of any party involved." 

Leaving One's Neutrality at the Mediation Room Door 

To help people resolve conflict requires a mediator to develop certain ways of listening; particular ways of communicating; and, specific ways of thinking about the malleability of "objective reality" in our subjectively experienced lives.  The practice of mediation is also revelatory of the raw power of people's affiliative desires -- their persistent urge to reconcile differences and settle accounts.  

When I leave the mediation room, I remain a mediator in spirit -- one who has seen the value of negotiated resolutions over the useof brute force and the power of collaboration over deference to an authoritarian decision-maker. 

I cannot express my preference for  Barack Obama any better than my friend and mentor Ken Cloke did in the electronic pages of mediate.com this spring.  As he concluded,

[c]apable international diplomacy requires open and committed listening, informal problem solving, prejudice reduction, collaborative negotiation, public dialogue, mediation, arbitration, ombudsmen’s offices, conflict resolution initiatives, and a panoply of proactive, adequately-funded resources that can be brought to bear on any problem. Positive examples can be found in every successful mediation and collaborative negotiation. Ideally, peace-making should receive the lion’s share of our national budget, allowing us to train every diplomat, and international representative in the most advanced mediation skills, include mediation in every treaty, and form an international corps of conflict resolvers, capable of building conflict resolution capacity globally, including in the US.

As mediators, we need to recognize that we also are global citizens, and responsible by virtue of our knowledge and experience for helping to save the planet. We need to weigh in on the important issues of the day that directly touch on our expertise, including not just who we negotiate with, but how we negotiate and why. Without it, Obama and the perspective he represents may succumb to those who think patriotism requires war and the slaughter of innocents. The time to speak up is now.

In electing a new President to lead us into a productive future, I believe, as do many of my mediator friends and colleagues, that Barack Obama is the clear choice.  If our political future is important to us, we will not hesitate to publicly lend him our support.

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The guys at Drug and Device Law Blog in Random Thoughts on Randomness have gone stark raving sane.  Please send medical assistance.  Western medicine.  With their stats, this could turn into a pandemic.

We admit it: We're as crazy as the next guy.

Heck -- given that we spend nights and weekends feeding this blog, there's a pretty strong argument that we're crazier than the next guy.

We fret about whether each and every one of the ten million documents has been reviewed and coded correctly, and we change commas into dashes -- and back again -- in footnote nine on page thirty of the brief.

We believe that our clients are more likely to win if we do our jobs right, and we devote an awful lot of energy to that cause.

And then the system kicks in.

Courts make utterly unpredictable procedural rulings that dramatically change the value of our cases. The MDL Panel, for example, may decide to consolidate a set of cases in a jurisdiction that previously had nothing to do with the litigation -- like sending Breast Implants to Alabama or Albuterol to Wyoming -- and all of a sudden an unanticipated body of local appellate law governs your federal issues, and your cases are either won or lost for reasons beyond your control. (See In re Korean Airlines, 829 F.2d 1171 (D.C. Cir. 1987).)

Or you tee up a legal issue in front of a judge, and you can't predict the result, because the cases are breaking fifty/fifty in that area. The judge might grant summary judgment, or he might deny it. Or, as happened in Tucker v. SmithKline Beecham recently, he might grant the motion in September and reconsider the following July. Your lawyering skills presumably had nothing to do with it.

One judge grants a Daubert motion, holding that the evidence linking Accutane to inflammatory bowel disease is junk science, inadmissible in a court of law. But, a couple of weeks earlier, a New Jersey jury had awarded millions of dollars of damages based on that same evidence.

One judge holds that a claim accrued on the day the plaintiff was diagnosed with a disease, and another holds that the identical claim -- on identical facts -- didn't accrue until the plaintiff "discovered" his claim based on press coverage or an article in the scientific literature. The statute of limitations bars the first claim; the second one goes forward.

You're a hero or a goat, and you had nothing to do with it.

One judge holds that the warnings on your client's product are adequate as a matter of law. Another holds that the question of adequacy is one of fact, to be decided by a jury.

One jury then finds in your client's favor, but a second jury -- looking at precisely the same warnings -- finds the opposite.

We're not complaining about this, really.

They're our lives, after all, and we picked this profession, and it can be awfully exciting and challenging and, yes, fun.

But doesn't it sometimes feel a tad random?

More to the point, our system sinks tens of millions of dollars into massive discovery to ensure that every last fact is known -- presumably in pursuit of an accurate result. But those carefully honed inputs then yield results that are both unpredictable and flatly inconsistent with each other (which means that at least one was wrong).

If the system ultimately values cases wildly inconsistently, just why does society invest massive resources into trying to ensure accuracy? Aren't there better things to do with our collective wealth?

But we digress.

We have to go back to scrutinizing the footnotes in all of the drug and device precedents, to pry out of them every last ounce of utility for our clients.

If we didn't, then a brief might not be perfect, and we might be more likely to lose.

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In this part of the new series on getting the parties to the bargaining table, I interview former in-house Chrysler counsel and former Hogan & Hartson partner, Lew Goldfarb, who now has his own full-time outside settlement counsel firm.  

For Lew's full bio and contact information, click here.

• what's the difference between outside settlement counsel and a mediator?

Settlement counsel is an advocate for one side, in my case, that's usually the defense.  While the mediator is a neutral who tries to facilitate a compromise, settlement counsel attempts to achieve better outcomes for his clients for two reasons:  (a) I have a complete understanding of the full range of my clients' interests, many of which are often not communicated to litigation counsel; and, (b) it is easier for me to learn the true motivations (if not the bottom line) of plaintiffs' counsel than it is for litigation counsel to do so.

In class actions, which are my specialty, I strive to craft a solution that responds to plaintiffs' counsel's needs while imposing minimal costs on my client. There are numerous, creative ways to settle class actions that accomplish both objectives effectively.

• I sometimes find that the parties for whom I mediate have not confided in the litigation team all of the corporate interests that are propelling the client toward settlement. I found this to be true in litigation practice and as a mediator. Do you encounter this as outside settlement counsel and, if so, how do you serve the client's interests without stepping on the toes of litigation counsel and vice verse.

There's always a bit of a communication gap between litigation counsel and the client.  When clients hire me as settlement counsel it's in their interest to provide me with complete information in order to get them the best possible outcome, so they rarely withhold any important information fro me. In a recent case, I was not only invited to speak at several client board meetings, I was also asked to spend several days in the field on sales trucks to observe the client's franchisees that were the subject of the lawsuit.  As a mediator, I usually only see the information that the litigation counsel provides as part of his client's submission, which is probably much more selective.

• Now that I've been mediating full time for four years, I find I'm much more prone to ask the parties interest-based questions than I was as a litigator. When I say "interest based," I mean corporate realities such as chain of command; upcoming mergers or acquisitions; a new management team; quarter- or year-end financial planning; divisional loss history; and, the like.  If you find that to be true as outside settlement counsel, what do you think accounts for corporate counsel keeping their litigation team largely in the dark about issues that might have a substantial impact on the ultimate resolution of the matter?

Since I have always approached litigation with a view toward early resolution, either as in house counsel, outside litigator or mediator, I would usually make the same inquiries regarding the client interests that you do as a mediator. My only explanation as to why corporate counsel may withhold such information from their litigators may be that they are not seeking a negotiated outcome. In that case, they may believe that their litigators will be more effective and focused without being encumbered with "interest-based" information.

• My peers in the mediation world are fond of saying that litigators have to "churn" cases before settling them. I find that a shockingly cynical attitude.  I often found that clients were more settlement averse than their litigation counsel.  What is your experience in that regard?

I have to admit that I am more on the side of the cynics. I've had this longstanding belief that the legal profession imposes enormous economic costs on society without a commensurate benefit to the public, all in the name of providing access to the legal process. (See Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar, 423 U.S.886 [1975]) I believe that litigators tell themselves that they were hired to litigate not settle the case. I think it's less a matter of "churning" than it is the litigators' belief believe that "early" resolution means winning a dispositive motion, even if it takes a year or more to get an outcome. (See my article "Litigate it or End it" which discusses this issue.)

While there are always legitimate corporate reasons for not settling a case, litigators are reluctant to discuss early settlement with their clients for two reasons: (1) loss of fees; and, (2) fear of showing any lack of resolve to win the case. My experience is not that clients are settlement averse, rather that litigation counsel convince their clients to hold off on settlement for one more dispositive motion.

• How did you come to champion the use of settlement counsel? 

I honed my skills as settlement counsel while serving for 16 years in house at Chrysler. When I arrived at Chrysler in 1985, the company was engaged in costly litigation with GM over a GM/Toyota joint manufacturing venture in Calif. The General Counsel asked me to look for alternatives to the litigation, which is when I found an article by Roger Fisher of Harvard promoting the use of separate settlement counsel. Chrysler did so and settled the case within a few months. I was then placed in the role of overseeing all class action litigation and serving as settlement counsel as well. Most in house counsel are not sufficiently immersed in the litigation, however, to serve as settlement counsel or simply do not have the time.

• As a former litigation partner in an AmLaw 100 law firm, do you wish you'd had inside settlement attorneys working side by side the litigation team? 

Because of my experience as in house counsel settling cases, I was always the partner urging my fellow litigators to evaluate settlement possibilities. For all the reasons set forth in my answers above, most large law firms do not embrace the idea of institutionalizing an in-firm settlement section. One exception was Wilmer Cutler in DC which did set up an ADR group within the firm with the idea that clients would make use of it. I don't know whether it still exists. I still think it is a great idea, although not as effective as the hiring of a completely separate firm or individual to explore settlement.

• Doesn't it take outside settlement counsel an unnecessarily long time to "get up to speed" on a major piece of litigation -- thereby making it less cost effective than simply hiring a mediator to help the litigators settle their own cases?

Not at all.  When I take on an assignment as settlement counsel I provide the client with a budget that includes a separate breakdown for "up to speed" time. While I need to understand the merits of the client's defense I do not need to read all the briefs since I generally am not called on to argue the merits of the case. Most importantly, I must fully understand what the client's interests are and what it is willing to offer up in settlement. For better or worse, what I offer is a very low cost, low risk means of exploring and settling complex litigation. 

Thanks Lew!  I can think of a couple of complex anti-trust, securities and IP cases I could have used your services for.  I hope this interview gets the word out to attorneys feeling pressured to settle a difficult case but unable to get the other side to the bargaining table.

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We continue today with our multi-part series of interviews with JAMS GC Jay Welsh in which he and  Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure - Oil & Gas, talk about mediating and arbitrating international and complex commercial disputes.  They also discuss the mediation of class actions, particularly those arising from mass torts.  

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UPDATE:  FOR THE LAW.COM AMERICAN LAWYER ARTICLE ON THE NEGOTIATION OF THIS SETTLEMENT, FAMILIAR FACES CENTRAL TO SETTLEMENT (ETC.) CLICK HERE; EXCERPT BELOW:

When you're negotiating a multibillion-dollar settlement, it helps if you've already made similar deals with the lawyers on the other side of the table.

The veteran dealmakers who put together W.R. Grace & Co.'s settlement of asbestos claims, which was announced Tuesday, "know each other well and know the process well," says David Bernick, the Kirkland & Ellis partner who led the talks for Grace. The lawyers representing asbestos plaintiffs in the negotiations were Perry Weitz of Weitz & Luxenberg, Joseph Rice of Motley Rice, Steve Baron of Baron and Budd, and John Cooney of Cooney & Conway.

"These are the same folks I've done business with for many years," adds Bernick. "That makes it much, much easier."

For remainder of article, click here.

The Baltimore Business Journal announced today the W.R. Grace & Co. tentative $2B settlement on asbestos claims here. 

W.R. Grace & Co. Inc. has reached a proposed settlement of all current and future asbestos-related personal injury claims against the company -- a huge step toward Grace's goal of emerging from bankruptcy reorganization.

Columbia-based chemicals giant Grace (NYSE: GRA) filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001, facing huge liabilities related to asbestos. The company said Monday that it has reached the tentative settlement with a committee of asbestos personal injury claimants, a representative handling future claims and a committee of Grace stockholders.

The complex settlement would total more than $2 billion and would include:

• $250 million in cash;
• Deferred payments of $110 million per year for five years beginning in 2019, and $100 million per year for 10 years beginning in 2024. The deferred payments would be backed by just over half of Grace's common stock;
• Warrants to buy 10 million shares of Grace common stock at an exercise price of $17 per share. The warrants would expire a year after Grace's reorganization plan takes effect. Grace shares were trading at $26.78 late Monday morning, up 8 percent;
• Rights to proceeds of Grace's asbestos-related insurance coverage;
• The value of cash and stock under settlements of litigation with Sealed Air Corp. and Fresenius Medical Care Holdings.

For the complete article, click here.

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The New York Times Reported today that 44,000 people have signed up for the Vioxx settlement here.  Excerpt below.  For full report click on link.

More than 44,000 people have signed up for a piece of a $4.85 billion settlement over the withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, a sign that the deal is on track to go forward, the drug’s maker, Merck & Company, announced Monday.

Of roughly 47,000 people who registered for the settlement this year, more than 44,000 have submitted all or some of the paperwork necessary for enrollment in the deal, Merck said.

People who enrolled by Friday could be eligible to receive an interim payment later this year.

Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., has said it will withdraw from the agreement unless at least 85 percent of people in different groups of claimants join in the settlement.

Those thresholds would be met — and exceed 93 percent of eligible claims in each of four main categories — if all of the more than 44,000 submissions are verified, the company said.

A lead plaintiffs’ lawyer, Andy Birchfield, said Monday that the enrollment figures were “extremely encouraging.”

Also see the Wall Street Journal Law Blog's coverage of the probable "victory" for this settlement here.  

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What does the decision in Riegel v. Medtronic have to do with dispute resolution?  A lot if we collectively pause to commit ourselves to using this calamity/victory as an opportunity to benefit both industry and the public at the same time.  

Is that possible?  I'm a mediator for goodness sakes.  If I didn't believe that to be possible, I'd serve the world better by getting a real estate license.  

Re:  what follows:  I rarely see anyone representing a narrow set of industry interests respond to a victory of any magnitude with the humility and vision expressed by Mark Herrmann in his post from Drug and Device Law -- Much is Given, Much is Expected, excerpted below. 

The medical device industry, or at least the most innovative part of it, received major relief from product liability litigation yesterday in Riegel v. Medtronic (now online at 2008 WL 440744). As long as our clients with PMA-approved devices comply with federal law, they’re not going to be subject to much in the way of product liability. Not only that, as we pointed out only two weeks ago, so-called “parallel” (or “violation”) claims have their own conceptual problems, given the exclusive grant of enforcement authority to the FDA.

That’s not what we’re talking about right now, though. We’re stone, cold sober.

We won. What does that mean? At bottom, it means that, just as Riegel gives some of our clients the opportunity for a more litigation-free existence, that increased freedom carries with it a correspondingly increased responsibility.

Plaintiffs lawyers like to say (at least when they’re not piously denying the “regulatory effect” of tort law in briefs opposing preemption) that product liability litigation serves as an incentive to make safer products.

We defense lawyers retort that product liability litigation is horribly ineffective (given the influence of so many non-merits issues), inefficient (plaintiffs’ lawyers take 33% or more of most recoveries, and that’s not even counting defense costs), and downright counterproductive (deterring innovation, and punishing manufacturers for doing the right thing when they discover problems) compared to governmental regulation as a means of ensuring product safety.

Well, now we’re going to find out who’s really right.

In other words, the PMA medical device field is going to determine in practice whether a high regulation, low litigation environment is as effective a method of ensuring the safety of the public as we think it is – or if it’s as lousy a way of ensuring safe medical devices as the other side claims.

So, to the medical device industry – to the regulators at the FDA – and to our colleagues who practice FDCA regulatory law…. Don’t let us down, please.

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Thanks to Drug & Device Law for pointing us to the CSPAN video of a recent forum on the VIOXX settlement here.

This American Enterprise Institute forum will not be beneficial to plaintiffs who are searching for advice on whether to accept the settlement themselves. I refer those people back to their attorneys. 

Here's a link to a Yahoo discussion group for Plaintiffs making the decision whether to accept the offer.

For reporters who are following this story at depth, the video includes a sophisticated presentation by Jones Day attorney Mark Herrmann about settlement strategy from Merck's point of view; a provocative presentation by Professor George M. Cohen -- who calls the settlement proposal an illegal antitrust conspiracy -- and a scholarly presentation by Professor Nagareda on the public policy issues raised by the settlement of mass tort claims.  

For attorneys who have been retained to provide their clients with a second opinion, Professor Cohen's presentation will be a useful addition to their own research and independent conclusions.  Attorney Andy Birchfield -- the only forum speaker with first hand knowledge of the negotiations leading to the settlement proposal -- may be of the greatest interest as he walks counsel for Plaintiffs through the structure, purpose and effect of the proposed settlement program.  

Speakers in this forum include:

The incredibly well-spoken Mark Herrmann of Jones Day and the Drug & Device Law Blog. 

Mark modestly fails to mention in his Blog post concerning this video that he is one of the speakers on this panel. 

Herrmann discusses the following questions:

1. did Merck's settlement strategy make sense; and,
2. will this settlement buy Merck peace.

George M. Cohen, University of Virginia Law School Professor who discusses ethical issues pertaining to the "settlement program proposal."  

Professor Cohen not only concludes that attorneys recommending this proposal to their clients are violating professional ethics, but asserts that it constitutes an illegal antitrust "conspiracy" as well. 

Vanderbilt Law School Professor Richard Nagareda, author of the book Mass Torts in a World of Settlement. 

Professor Nagareda discusses the settlement from a dispute resolution public policy standpoint. 

As a contract between Merck on the one hand and the "lawyers who have a large market share" on the other, Professor Nagareda suggests that the settlement proposal is more an artifact of the law flowing from the Supreme Court's AmChem opinion than of any legal "connivance" among the Plaintiffs' attorneys or between them and Merck.

This settlement proposal, he says, is a valuable and creative peace-making transaction for mass claims.   

Andrew Birchfield, an attorney at Beasley Allen and co-lead counsel on the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee for the federal Vioxx litigation addresses the negotiations themselves and the structure of the settlement.

Andy says that in approaching settlement Merck required global peace -- that there couldn't be a "second round" because Merck had seen how disastrous open-ended liabilities could be for a corporation.

The plaintiffs' attorneys, says Birchfield, negotiated a settlement agreement designed to serve the best interests of each individual client no matter how strong or weak each of their cases might be.

Attorney Ted Frank of the American Enterprise Institute who once represented Merck in the Vioxx litgation. 

Frank talks about the law and economics of the settlement proposal, focusing on the weakest link of Plaintiffs' cases -- causation.

See also the Blog of the Legal Times coverage of this forum here.

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Claiming that the $4.85 billion Vioxx Settlement improperly "allows [defendant] Merck to dictate the advice a lawyer will offer" to clients, some Vioxx plaintiffs' attorneys have asked the federal judge overseeing the deal to "keep some of their clients outside the settlement while still allowing other clients to accept it."

Under the global settlement agreement reached by lead counsel in New Orleans last month, "if the lawyers want any of their clients to receive money from the settlement, they must recommend the deal to all their clients." 

Those attorneys resisting the requirement are saying not only that the provision "would prevent them from offering the best independent judgment for each client" but that "[a]greeing to the provision might open them to future lawsuits from disgruntled clients."

All quotations above are from Alex Berenson's New York Times article, Some Lawyers Seek Changes in Vioxx Settlement. 

Previous commentary on the ethics of this provision by legal bloggers, including our own thoughts here, can be found at the Legal Ethics Forum here, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog here, FindLaw here; the Mass Tort Litigation Blog here;  Drug and Device Law here (but please don't call them for comment); Texas Lawyer here; and, Pharmalot here.

Have you ever seen such high level free legal advice in your lifetime?  And it's not even redundant.  So, no, Concurring Opinions, I don't think we've saturated the legal blogosphere.  I think everyone is just taking a deep breath to sort through the talent and find their niche.

In the meantime, have we stopped being troubled by the advertisement of pharmaceuticals direct to consumer (image above) as if they were laundry soap? 

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