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According to Robert Wright in The Evolution of God (reviewed in todays NYT Book Review by Paul Bloom) "God has mellowed" from a capricious tyrant into non-zero-sum playing diety.  This is  good news for mediators and anyone else in search of a better paradigm for conflict resolution than the 16th century adversarial system.  As Bloom explains Wright:

When people see themselves in zero-sum relationship with other people — see their fortunes as inversely correlated with the fortunes of other people, see the dynamic as win-lose — they tend to find a scriptural basis for intolerance or belligerence.” The recipe for salvation, then, is to arrange the world so that its people find themselves (and think of themselves as) interconnected: “When they see the relationship as non-zero-sum — see their fortunes as positively correlated, see the potential for a win-win outcome — they’re more likely to find the tolerant and understanding side of their scriptures.” Change the world, and you change the God. For Wright, the next evolutionary step is for practitioners of Abrahamic faiths to give up their claim to distinctiveness, and then renounce the specialness of monotheism altogether. In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.

Having just finished reading Wright's The Moral Animal (an evolutionary exploration for our tendency to reciprocal altruism)  and taking the long view of Western Civilization, I'm pre-disposed to believe that we have not only evolved physically and intellectually, but "morally" as well.

I understand from Bloom's review that Wright -- either a firm agnostic or wavering atheist -- is moved to wonder whether a universe in which moral progress takes place might suggest the presence of a higher power.  Quoting Wright, Bloom observes:

[Wright] emphasizes that he is not arguing that you need divine intervention to account for moral improvement, which can be explained by a “mercilessly scientific account” involving the biological evolution of the human mind and the game-theoretic nature of social interaction. But he wonders why the universe is so constituted that moral progress takes place. “If history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

Whatever the source of our moral development, divine or "mercilessly scientific," its encouraging on a bright summer Sunday to believe we can achieve, if not perfection, at least greater decency toward the divine in one another.

 

 

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Check out Balkinization's Why is Empathy Controversial?  or Liberal, an excellent analysis of empathic wisdom (and blind spots) on the Bench in the wake of a noted Republican's vow  to filibuster any Supreme Court nominee who might commit the (liberal?) sin of empathizing from the Bench.

Emotion terms are notoriously slippery. But if we understand empathy as the ability to take the perspective of another, it ought to be uncontroversial that empathy is an important component of judicial judgment. Empathy, so understood, is a basic and necessary tool for making sense of the intentions and actions of others.

So, as Mark Graber asks, who could be against empathy? And more particularly, why is empathy liberal, if we all use it? Perhaps because empathy goes by another name when it comes easily—for example, when Supreme Court justices take the perspective of those from similar backgrounds or with similar worldviews. This sort of empathy looks neutral and natural, not ideological or partial. It tends to be portrayed as garden-variety judicial reasoning.

We all use empathy, and despite our best intentions, it is always selective and riddled with blind spots. We can try to correct for this partiality if we are self-aware. But those who study cognitive psychology and decision-making find that we aren’t all that good at identifying and critiquing our own background assumptions. A better way to encourage this sort of correction is through debate with others who hold differing viewpoints. Judges, like the rest of us, make better decisions when forced to examine and articulate their premises.

Read on here.

According to a recent article in the New Yorker (voice of the effete empathizing liberal east-coast establishment) we owe our conscious mind -- that which makes us human -- to the mirror neurons that give rise to to empathy (because we could "feel" the mind of another, at some point we turned that thought back against ourselves and consciousness was born).

And let's not forget that some brain researchers believe it is impossible to make any choices whatsoever in the absence of emotion (the "pure" logical mind will make endless pro and con lists absent the "gut" response that finally permits us to decide).

What does this have to do with negotiation?  Anyone who continues to believe that decisions are (or could potentially be) the product of a solely rational process are losing the benefit of the emotional sway every great negotiator exercises over his or her bargaining partner.

Geesh, even George Bush professed compassion (so long as the government wasn't providing it).  Does the Republican Party really wish to become the home of Darth Vadar? /1

________________

1/  Perhaps Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show described coverage of the pairing best. The show aired a clip of The Weekly Standard's William Kristol saying of the back-to-back speeches, "Just going to be fun, don't you think? Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, you know? And I want to say that I was always on Darth Vader's side." Stewart retorted, "Now you tell us. You know, as one of the main intellectual forces behind the Iraq war, that's kind of a weird thing to admit. You might have wanted to mention, 'Oh, quick caveat to my plan on a new American century: I'm on the Darth Vader side.' "

From "Fear of Closing Gitmo" at the Daily Kos

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I know I've been promising the publication of this book for a long, long time.  I'm half-way through the second draft though (my publisher Janis Publications will be pleased to know) and am feeling all bright and new about it again.

The brilliant and talented Laurie Barrows chose the images and did the lay-out of chapter one.  I'm not yet certain what final form the layout will take but I want to thank Laurie again for her initial efforts on behalf of the book.

Without more ado, the original first chapter, with promises for a late summer-early fall release.

To read, hit the full-screen icon at the bottom of the slide show.

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I'm re-posting below an article published in both the Los Angeles and the San Francisco Daily Journals (the local legal rags) about the dangers inherent in email communication.  I do so because I had several complaints about the use of abusive email by in-house counsel last week at my negotiation training as well as in my twitter network from attorneys exasperated with combative emailers who refuse to take telephone calls (see post about conflict avoidance here)

My advice?  Use the tried and true tit-for-tat strategy:  retaliate for uncooperative conduct and be quick to forgive as soon as your bargaining partners bring themselves back into line.  The advice I gave on twitter (@vpynchon) this morning was simple and pointed:  tell opposing counsel that you will program your email system to automatically delete all of their emails until they pick up the telephone and give you the courtesy of a return call.

Below, my Daily Journal article on the Dangers of Using Email During Litigation.

 

This story occurs in the spring of 2001, in a hotel room in Toronto, at 3 a.m., the morning of a deposition I've been preparing to take of an aging petrochemical engineer.

2001 is a  year I'd dreamed of since elementary school.  But the technological changes predicted in the science fiction of my childhood and adolescence are nothing like the "hi-tech" I'm living with now.  

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Here's part I of the Resource Materials for the full-day training which included this Power Point Presentation.

Part I includes articles (see the Table of Contents) on The Social Psychology of Conflict; Negotiation and Gender; Distributive Bargaining; and, Integrative and Interest-Based Negotiation.

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As every lawyer knows and most students of high school geometry must learn in mastering "proofs," the answer often comes first, the rationale later.  I used to say, "I'm a litigator, I can rationalize anything."  As a mediator, my rationalizations have turned from the way in which facts can be shoe-horned into causes of action or affirmative defenses to the way in which harm arising from a dispute (including, most assuredly, the moral harm of injustice) can be monetized.

Now David Brooks in the New York Times (which appears to have disabled the "copy" function/1) tells us that philosophy has been sacrificed on the alter of emotion in his column The End of Philosophy. 

As Brooks explains, reasoning comes after moral judgment and "is often guided by the emotions that preceded it."  The good news is that those emotions are not merely competitive.  Brooks again:

Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other, and stand together in the face of common threats.  Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history.  We don't just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals.   We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions.  We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

My mediation experience teaches me that the "soft" arts of influence, empathy, community-building, and prejudice reduction, are as important (and often more important) to the successful (i.e., satisfying) resolution of a lawsuit than our prized ability to parse the evidence,  rationalize away the bad and privilege the good to sell our "proof" to judge or jury.

Most importantly, I find that when attorneys' clients leave a mediation with the belief that a certain rough justice has been obtained, they are more satisfied with the outcome, and with their attorneys' representation of their interests, than they might have been had they left with 10% more change jingling in their pockets.

The experts who study mediation tell us that "neutrals" don't make the difference between settling or not settling.  The cases will settle with or without us.  The difference mediators make is not settlement, but  client satisfaction.  Satisfied clients are  an absolute necessity for a successful legal practice at any time.  In these hard times, legal practices may fail in the absence of resolutions addressing the justice issues your client sought out a lawyer to resolve in the first place.

Money is the instrument.  But justice is the issue.

 

 

 

 

_____________

1/  More about this at IP ADR later today.

 

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Interviews with ADR giants: Mediate.com opens video archive for month of April

Posted by: Diane Levin in Cool Things on the Web, Mediation, Mediation in Practice

Mediate.com, the world’s premier source for news, information, and articles about mediation, has opened its video archive to the public during the month of April.

For description of the type of videos available, run right over to Diane Levin's blog by clicking on the title up top.

Thanks Diane for getting the word out about this.

For a taste of some of the offerings, watch this short video of Ken Cloke talking to Robert Benjamin about the evolution of conflict  over the lifetime of an individual as well as over the lifetime of a civilization.

Cloke is my mentor and his insights are just as useful to the settlement of commercial litigation than are some of the competitive negotiation skills I've learned along the way.  Check out all of Ken's videos.

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Transparency Will Eliminate Unnecessary Wariness Between Parties (.pdf) from the April 1, 2009 Daily Journal

FORUM COLUMN By Victoria Pynchon As a mediator, the question I hear most frequently from lawyers is "How do I convince my opponent to sit down and negotiate without losing my competitive advantage?" Believe it or not, the answer is transparency. If you can remember way back to last July, when firms like Microsoft and Yahoo were still engaging in business as usual, you might recall that a merger fell apart because Yahoo was acting "weird." At least that's what Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, told the Wall Street Journal. "We had an offer out that was a 100 percent premium on the operating business of the company and there wasn't a serious price negotiation ... until three months later. It was a little ... weird." Lawyers know that three months rushes by in the blink of an eye. The board of directors meets. It seeks an analysis from the mergers and acquisitions people, who consult with outside counsel's antitrust department, which renders a decision but whose members first have to chat with the tax guys. Then there are the IP people with whom to discuss license agreements and, of course, the managers in the human resources department, who may or may not have advice about executive parachutes - platinum, golden or brass. And yet the Yahoo-Microsoft merger fell apart because Microsoft felt that Yahoo's delay was "weird." Let's go back to what every trial lawyer knows. In the absence of information, people make stuff up. Weird stuff. And the stories we tell ourselves about our uncommunicative commercial partners do not include one where the other guy is laboring day and night to fulfill our fondest desires. No. In the absence of information, we weave elaborate conspiracy theories in which our opponents are scheming to fleece us of our rights, obstruct our prospective economic advantage and turn our world upside down. Your dentist can tell you what your opponent wants to be told. A fully illustrated pre-game outline of the upcoming procedure that goes something like this "First I'll put a little numbing cream on your gum. That way the shot of Novocain won't hurt too much. Then I'll drill," she'd say, holding the fearful appliance up and switching it on. "It may sound louder in your mouth than it does here in my hand, but I'll only have it on for about five minutes, after which ... etc., etc." So how do you get your opponent to the bargaining table without sounding weak? You say "Listen, Ted, I know both our clients believe their cases are as good as gold but after an initial round of discovery, it's my practice to call a timeout to discuss settlement." Pause. "How does that sound to you?" Ted says it sounds all right. Which it does. Because Ted's got three incredibly acrimonious cases in his practice right now. Last year, one of his adversaries served an ex parte application with three bankers boxes of exhibits the day before Christmas. At 4:59 p.m.  And she scheduled the hearing for hearing on the day after Christmas. Sure, the judge would deny it, but Ted couldn't assume anything. He worked 15 hours on Christmas Day. So it sounds good to Ted. More important to your own litigation plan, your opponent has just agreed to come to the bargaining table, even though the actual meeting won't be held for several months. When the appointed hour arrives, you will not have to ask for a settlement conference at a time when it might show weakness on your part. It's part of the plan. For the remainder of the article, click here.

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Thanks to Anne Reed at Deliberations for "tweeting" (@annereed) the article Flexible Approach To Acute Conflict Results In More Frustration and Anger, Study Shows.

The research subject of the article suggested that having a more flexible approach to resolving an acute conflict interaction results in more frustration and anger.

I'll need to see the study itself to be convinced.  The study described merely suggests that people offering a greater number of solutions to a party pre-instructed to stonewall will become angrier than those offering fewer solutions, i.e., that those who persist in trying, and failing, to resolve a conflict, get more and more angry and frustrated than those who give up more easily.

This does not suggest to me that "greater negotiation flexibility" necessarily results in a greater degree of anger in the negotiation dyad, but only in the person attempting to resolve a dispute that his partner has been instructed to resist.  Though an apt description of the adversarial process, this is not a fair depiction of persistent attempts to negotiate resolution where the negotiators are given a fighting chance of closing a deal.

As the article explained, study participants were told that a neighbor was playing music too loudly and instructed to ask that it be turned down.

During the interaction, the [participants] followed a script of uncooperative responses such that the task could not be resolved.

"We categorized the verbal responses of participants during the task into seven types of negotiation strategies, including problem-solving and aggressive/threatening. Individuals who used a smaller set of strategies were considered less 'flexible' than those who used a greater variety of strategies," Roubinov said.

The [researchers] . . .  also looked at the intensity of participants' facial expressions of anger or frustration, and measured participants' biological response to the task using cortisol, a stress hormone.

"Our results indicated that greater flexibility may not be the healthiest approach," Roubinov said. "Unlike less-flexible participants, those who tried a greater variety of responses showed more intense facial expressions of anger and frustration. Cortisol levels in more flexible participants also reflected an unhealthier biological response to stress than the less flexible participants."

Of course persistent participants become increasingly frustrated (and angry!) when their multiple suggestions to resolve a dispute are met with stonewalling from their negotiation partner.  This doesn't suggest, however, that "greater [negotiation] flexibility" is not healthy.  It suggests that stonewalling leads to anger, one of the reasons that mediators are employed to help all participants in a negotiation generate potential solutions.

I'll look forward to seeing the study when it's released but based upon this article, I'd say the conclusion drawn is misleading broad and unduly pessimistic.

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Lawsuits arise from a process social psychologists call "naming, blaming and claiming."  I broke my toe last week (youch!)  when I was talking to my husband from another room and walking into a closet to hang up my jacket.  Jammed it on the door frame, once again engaging in the risk-courting activity of walking and talking at the same time.

If I were mentally ill, I suppose I could go so far as to name my husband as the source of my own lumpish carelessness; blame him for my injury; and, claim some sort of recompense beyond his willingness to kiss my toe to "make it all better."

"Well, I guess that doorway was just too narrow," my husband the litigator joked.  "I suppose you could sue the architect."

Much litigation flows from incidents nearly as foolish as this.  If you'd like to see a collection of such outrages, you likely already know where to go -- Walter Olson's Overlawyered where suits against McDonalds for obesity and the like can regularly be found.  Today's entry, about the alcoholic who sued Marriotts "after falling over a stairway while plowed" is a prime example.

Naming, blaming and claiming (as well as the litigation that flows from this process) will always be with us.  But if you have some degree of communication with the people likely to name and blame you before making a legal claim against you, an understanding of the social psychology behind that process may well help you understand and deal with the problem "on the ground," i.e., short of suit.

Today, I'm directing you to Attributing Blame — from the Baseball Diamond to the War on Terror as a good primer on the process and its underlying cause -- Fundamental Attribution Error.  Link courtesy of @JuryVox who any litigator or dispute resolver should be following on Twitter along with @annereed.

Whenever we witness something harmful or unexpected, we humans look to make attributions of causation, responsibility, and blame. Social psychologists have been studying the way we make those attributions for the last half century. Part of that research, known as attribution theory, focuses on how we draw inferences about how much control people exert over their behavior: the more control they appear to exert, the more we hold them responsible or blameworthy for the consequences of their actions. To assess control, we draw inferences about, among other things, whether the person acted volitionally or intentionally and about the person’s motivation. When we think an injurer acted intentionally and maliciously we attribute blame — which is accompanied by a desire to punish the injurer and to compensate the victim.

This naive psychology of blame attributions is fairly automatic and depends on more or less instantaneous impressions. And although our attributions result from inferences of, among other things, intent and motive, we are hampered by the fact that we cannot directly access someone else’s motives or intentions (in fact, we’re not very good at ascertaining our own). And, often, the individuals who we are judging have an interest in presenting themselves as innocent — regardless of the truth of the matter. In making attributions about another person’s harm-causing actions, therefore, we are often forced to rely on imperfect external cues. Conflict between individuals and groups often emerges precisely because attributional ambiguity leads to divergent interpretations and reactions. What a victim might perceive as outrageous, an injurer might construe as merely unfortunate or even richly deserved. The legal system is caught up in these attributional contests every day. For instance, most of tort law — in doctrine and in practice — is devoted to the question of resolving competing attributional accounts for the same personal injury.

Continue reading at the linked headline above.  My most popular article on this process - Conspiracy Theories and Granfalloons can be found here.

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From the Department of Counter-Intution we learn that our general assumption about pre-trial discovery -- that the open exchange of information will help align the expectations of disputants and increase efficiency by facilitating settlement /1 -- is probably inaccurate.

In When Ignorance is Bliss:  Information, Fairness, and Bargaining Efficiency, George Loewenstein, Department of Social and Decision Sciences and Don A. Moore, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, at Carnegie Mellon University, tell us that when "information . . . is complex or ambiguous enough to allow for different interpretations" by opposing counsel,

[s]elf-serving interpretations of fairness encourage biased estimations of the probability of prevailing in court and lead people to hold out too long, fight too hard, and settle too slowly.

Simply put, because we interpret incoming information as confirming -- and often strengthening -  our existing views, the "convergence" of adversarial views pre-trial discovery proponents hoped for, does not occur.  Rather, discovery tends to increase the parties' belief in the rectitude of their analysis, thereby proportionally decreasing the potential for settlement.  As Loewenstein and Moore explained:

In studies examining the self-serving bias, the magnitude of the bias was an extremely strong predictor of impasse, and two different manipulations that eliminated the bias led to close to 100 percent settlement compared to an impasse rate of about 25 percent in the absence of such debiasing.

The full article is well worth reading even though much of it is burdened with academese.

Because we attorneys pride ourselves on being able to "see the other side," here's an article entitled Confirmation Bias in Complex Analyses about a study in which intelligence analysts were provided with an analytic tool to help them overcome confirmation bias.  The tool -- Analysis of Competing Hypotheses -- was an

hypothesis testing matrix,” where the rows represent the evidence, the columns the hypotheses under consideration, and the cells the extent to which each piece of evidence is consistent or inconsistent with each hypothesis. The goals of the ACH matrix [were meant] to overcome the memory limitations affecting one’s ability to keep multiple data and hypotheses in mind, and to break the tendency to focus on developing a single coherent story for explaining the evidence—a tendency which [other researchers] hypothesized create[d] predecision distortions (and presumably the confirmation bias).

ACH [was] hypothesized to offset confirmation bias by ensuring that analysts actively rate evidence against multiple hypotheses and reminding analysts to focus on disconfirming evidence.

Absent the template, the process sounds a lot like that we attorneys use to test our theories and evaluate those of our opponents'.  Alas ACH provided the least amount to help to those study participants with professional analytic experience.  As the authors report, "ACH had no impact at all" on the professional analysts' tendency to give greater weight to the evidence that supported their theories and less to that which disconfirmed them.

What to do?  I'll attempt to find an answer before writing my next post.

______________________

Loewenstein and Moore quote Richard Posner on this expectation as follows: 

a full exchange of information…is likely to facilitate settlement by enabling each party to form a more accurate, and generally therefore a more convergent, estimate of the likely outcome of the case.

Richard A. Posner (1986:525) Economic Analysis of Law (3rd ed. Little, Brown 1986)

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Daily Journal Newswire Articles www.dailyjournal.com © 2009 The Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved.

FORUM (FORUM & FOCUS)  •  Jan. 08, 2009 Every Case Is a Winding Road FORUM COLUMN By Victoria Pynchon I have a confession to make. I am about to become embroiled in litigation. Though I preach the religion of negotiated resolution, I've nevertheless hired litigation counsel to assert my rights and pursue my remedies. This is one of those moments when the rubber of our ideology meets the road of personal circumstance, the moment we are called upon to decide to walk our talk or take the more familiar road. For more than 30 years - first as paralegal, then as a law student and finally as a commercial litigator - I'd been swimming in the waters of legal rights and remedies. The adversarial ocean had become so familiar a habitat that it rarely occurred to me that I was under the surface. One day toward the end of my first year of mediation practice, a much more experienced friend hooked me by the cheek and threw me on the deck of his ship, where I was gasping for air. He'd asked me to co-mediate a will contest without the benefit on my clergy - lawyers with experience in the field. The "fish out of water" conversation that ensued went something like this: Joe Mediator: "The family doesn't want to hire a lawyer. They just want to mediate." Vickie: "But I know absolutely nothing about wills, trusts and estates. The parties need to talk to a lawyer first to learn their rights and remedies." Joe: "You still don't get it, do you?" Vickie: "Get what?" Joe: "It's not about rights and remedies. It's about interests." Vickie: "But how can they evaluate their interests without knowing their rights and remedies?" Joe: "Because they're not interested in what the law says - they want to do what they believe is right for them as a family under the circumstances." These people wanted to resolve a legal dispute without knowing their legal rights? Were they nuts? I understood "interests" - they were all the rage in ADR circles - the desires, fears and needs of the parties that drove them to take legal positions. Sometimes those interests were non-economic - the need for revenge, the desire to be personally accountable, the fear of failure, the hope for forgiveness and reconciliation. Others, though economic, could not be remedied by way of damages - better access to foreign markets, for instance, or wider distribution chains; the acquisition of better manufacturing processes; or, the retention of executives with "pull" in Washington. But all of those matters were secondary to legal rights and remedies, weren't they? You had to know what your rights were. To read entire article, click here. Here's a .pdf of the article taken from the "hard copy" of the paper.

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There's a great new LinkedIn Group Mediators and Peacemakers that anyone interested in the dynamics of conflict and its resolution should think about joining.  Recently, a group member posed this question:

How do you as a mediator recognize the signs of cross cultural differences and how do you resolve that type of dispute? How often do you come across this type of dispute?

I was thinking about how I might answer it when I noticed that my colleague and friend, mediation guru Lee Jay Berman, had taken the time to jot down his thoughts, which were better than any I was having, yet precisely expressed my own experience mediating conflict.

Here's what Lee Jay had to say:

I think that some is easy to recognize, like two Korean businessmen walking in with their counsel, knowing that they will have a value system that is based around how Korean businesses conduct themselves, and knowing that trying to overlay that onto an American legal system is going to be awkward for them.

But my belief is that NEARLY ALL conflicts are cross-cultural. The vast majority of what I see as cross-cultural conflicts don't present themselves as such at first glance because they may occur between two people of the same color skin, same nationality, same faith and even same family. I think we risk falling into the belief that cross cultural disputes only exist when we have people of different racial cultures at the table. We sometimes think we can turn our cross-cultural radar off when both people sitting there look the same to us. But to me, most conflict comes from different cutltural perspectives, different expectations based on how we were raised and what they see as "normal" or how people "should" conduct themselves.

The example I live with is that my wife and I were both raised Jewish, both families grew up with Christmas trees in our homes, too. We both went to UCLA, we both love sports, and the list goes on and on. When we married, we had the expectation that we would be relatively the same when it came to living our lives together. But when it came to communication styles, especially around disputes or disagreements, what we each learned from our families (the tribes in which we were raised and where we learned our norms) could not have been more different. Early in our marriage, this created constant cross-cultural disputes, which turned into conflict because of the assumptions we each made about what was the "normal" way to deal with disagreements. On paper, most people would never say that my wife and I were cross-cultural, but in real life, we had a huge cross-cultural rift that was invisible to most, and even to us at first.

The moral of this story is that we must ALWAYS be looking for evidence of cross-cultural issues, even when they don't present with different skin color.

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I'd stop flogging this dead horse if I didn't have to weekly convince litigants of their own enduring human tendency to prefer relative well-being over absolute material possessions.

This week, that "news" is brought to you by the New York Times to explain why a surprising number of us have not been made terribly unhappy as our financial fortunes decline.  As Op-Ed contributor Sonja Lyubomirsky (of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want) observes today:

the economists David Hemenway and Sara Solnick demonstrated in a study at Harvard, many people would prefer to receive an annual salary of $50,000 when others are making $25,000 than to earn $100,000 a year when others are making $200,000.

Why? Because we "care more about social comparison, status and rank than about the absolute value of our bank accounts or reputations."  In other words, we're more concerned with justice (fairness) than we are about the money.  Which is why our clients have sought out our help with their personal, financial and commercial problems -- because we're in the justice business.  When we understand this, the negotiation of financial settlements becomes a whole lot easier because there are many more ways to deliver justice than by throwing money at it.  

Read the full (short) article Why We’re Still Happy here.

 

 

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From this coming Monday's Forum Column in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (byline V. Pynchon):

 

Psychologists tell us that we are not only "meaning making" beings, but that we are all born conspiracy theorists. Viewing a field of nonsensical, unrelated data, we naturally begin to "connect the dots" - to organize the information into a coherent, and often compelling, narrative.

Pattern making or conspiracy theorizing is a human survival mechanism. We have never been the fastest or the biggest creatures on the planet. We don't have the sharpest teeth or blend in all that well with the scenery. Our soft, easily punctured skin is not covered with a protective shell. In a pinch, we can't take a running leap and fly away from land-bound carnivores who might make us their prey.

We are, however, the canniest creatures on the planet. To avoid the tiger who made lunch of our best comrade, we surveyed the scene and committed the pattern of otherwise unrelated details to memory. Five banyan trees, a narrow stream, and, a pile of rubble left by a recent avalanche means "there are tigers here."

Couple this with Fundamental Attribution Error and you have all of the ingredients necessary to blame inadvertently caused harm on elaborate conspiracies cooked up by our untrustworthy companions - Fundamental Attribution Error being our universal tendency to over-emphasize the role of others' negative personality traits to explain why harm befell us.

So it is with our legal adversaries. Once the channels of communication have been severed by the filing of a lawsuit, attorneys and clients alike begin to make up "what really happened" based on predispositions, scattered conversations, faulty memories and scraps of documentation.

 

Continue reading Monday's Daily Journal Forum Column here.

 

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People who are joined together by a dispute -- which includes everyone engaged in litigation and their attorneys -- are suffering more than most from a universal cognitive bias known as fundamental attribution error.  FAE is one of the ways we explain our troubles to one another. 

If we have suffered misfortune and are able to attribute our loss to the actions of another, we will universally attribute the series of events resulting in our loss to the bad intentions or evil character of the person we lawyers call "the defendant." 

If we are the defendant, we will universally attribute the series of events resulting in the injured party's loss to the circumstances causing Plaintiff's harm (or, of course, to the Plaintiff's evil intentions). 

The attribution of harm primarily to character or motive on the part of the victim and primarily to circumstance on the part of the accused is fundamental because it is hard-wired into the way we think.  It is an attribution error because it attributes effect to a particular type of cause.  It is error because all human activity and the inevitable conflicts that arise from it

"take[s] place not only between individuals, but in a context, culture and environment; surrounded by social, economic, and political forces; inside a group or organization; contained by a system and structure; among a diverse community of people at a particular moment in time and history; on a stage; against a backdrop; in a setting or milieu."

See Ken Cloke's Conflict Revolution (this from the Introduction) here and my review of it at The Complete Lawyer here.

In other words, all events, conflicts, injuries, and benefits, all causes and effects are determined both by human actors and by circumstance.  We are the cause and the effect of everything that surrounds us and everything that we surround.

How does this knowledge help us resolve our disputes and why does the way we tell our stories hold the key to resolving them?   I could give you more explanations from the field of social psychology or I could simply tell you a story.  In this case, I tell the story of a book of stories written by Malcolm Gladwell who writes about the stories we tell ourselves and one another about success. Gladwell, we're told, introduces us to Bill Gates as

a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates’s high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end. By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer.

At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates says. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.” Gates’s talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so.  

Continue reading the NYT Sunday Book Review of Gladwell's new book, Outliers, here.

More on using dual narratives to help you settle litigation tomorrow (or later this afternoon)

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Leave it to a legal marketing blog -- Lawyer Casting - to choose Evolution Day for its first entry into the BlawgReviewOSphere.  As blogger Joshua Fruchter explains in Blawg Review #187, because the anniversary of Charles Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859 is inextricably intertwined with the idea that only the fittest survive, Evolution Day should be celebrated with advice for survival.  And so it is.

For those of us who toil the legal fields, Fruchter suggests a range of survival options including

• Excelling at Our Work with links to Drug and Device Law; Law Prof on the Loose; and our own post on sincere and effective apology.
• Switching Practice Areas with links to the Bankruptcy Practice Pro; The Volokh Conspiracy; Conglomerate; the Electronic Frontier Foundation; PomTalk; the Legal Blog Watch; Pepper Podcasts /*; and, the Antitrust Review.
• Going Solo with links to Charon QC (an interview with Susan Cartier Liebel about Solo Practice U; ) the greatest American Lawyer; and, Law21; and,
• Leaving Law with (what else?) Above the Law; JD Bliss; and, Rush on Business.

There's advice for law firms here as well, so crawl on out of the loser gene pool and make your way over to Blawg Review # 187.  The survival of the legal species might just well depend upon it!

Note that Eric Turkewitz at the New York Personal Injury Law Blog  will host Blawg Review #188.  Anyone interested in participating in future blog carnivals should take a look at Blawg Review, which has information about next week's host and instructions on how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues.

Finally, in true celebration of Evolution Day, take a look at some of the most enduring misconceptions about Darwin's paradigm breaking theory here, including the fact -- noted by Fruchter -- that Darwin did not originate the phrase "survival of the fittest."

________________

*/ Pepper Hamilton is podcasting??????  A short but vivid season of my legal career was served as a Pepper associate back in the late '80s (Alum Network here) when this grand old Philadelphia law firm turned 100 at which time it was still using quill pens - at least in the Philly office.  In the Los Angeles office, we associates routinely gathered in the library (yes! with books) and were required to share the one Lexis/Nexis research station which we were forbidden to use except in the most dire circumstances and with pre-approval.

 

 

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Many in the legal blogosphere are buzzing about the recent Supreme Court decision letting stand a Central District injunction barring wheelchair-bound Jarek Molski from filing further ADA accessibility cases in our local federal trial court here in Los Angeles.  See Justice Berzon's and Kozinski's spirited dissents to Ninth Circuit's Per Curiam refusal of the Petition for a full panel re-hearing here.

Mr. Molski was declared a vexatious litigant by the California Central District federal court back in 2004.  See Wendel Rosen's excellent report of that case here.  Molski v. Mandarin Touch Restaurant, 347 F. Supp. 2d 860 (C.D. Cal.2004) (declaring Molski a vexatious litigant and requiring court approval prior to his filing future lawsuits); aff'd Molski v. Evergreen Dynasty here.

Still active is Molski's case in the Eastern District of California which was recently permitted to go forward by the same Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.  As the Ninth Circuit explained the factual background of Mr. Molski's "serial litigation,"

[Plaintiff] Molski and his lawyer Thomas Frankovich (“Frankovich”) were purportedly in the business of tracking down public accommodations with ADA violations and extorting settlements out of them. On cross examination, Molski acknowledged that: he did not complain to any of [the defendant's] employees about his access problems; he had filed 374 similar ADA lawsuits as of October 8, 2004; Frankovich had filed 232 of the 374 lawsuits; even more lawsuits had been filed since that date; Molski and Frankovich averaged $4,000 for each case that settled; Molski did not pay any fees to Frankovich; Molski maintained no employment besides prosecuting ADA cases, despite his possession of a law degree; Molski’s projected annual income from settlements was $800,000;2 Molski executed blank verification forms for Frankovich to submit with responses to interrogatories; they had also filed lawsuits against two other restaurants owned by Cable’s; they had filed a lawsuit against a nearby restaurant; and Sarantschin obtained up to 95% of his income from Frankovich’s firm for performing investigations for ADA lawsuits.

See Molski v. MJ Cable, Inc. here.

Despite these apparently damning facts, in its 2007 affirmance of the vexatious litigant finding, the Ninth Circuit noted some of the reasons why Molski and his lawyer could not be condemned for their pursuit of serial ADA litigation.  The ADA, noted the Court,

does not permit private plaintiffs to seek damages, and limits the relief they may seek to injunctions and attorneys’ fees. We recognize that the unavailability of damages reduces or removes the incentive for most disabled persons who are injured by inaccessible places of public accommodation to bring suit under the ADA. See Samuel R. Bagenstos, The Perversity of Limited Civil Rights Remedies: The Case of “Abusive” ADA Litigation, 54 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 1, 5 (2006).

As a result, most ADA suits are brought by a small number of private plaintiffs who view themselves as champions of the disabled. District courts should not condemn such serial litigation as vexatious as a matter of course. See De Long, 912 F.2d at 1148 n.3. For the ADA to yield its promise of equal access for the disabled, it may indeed be necessary and desirable for committed individ- uals to bring serial litigation advancing the time when public accommodations will be compliant with the ADA.

But as important as this goal is to disabled individuals and to the public, serial litigation can become vexatious when, as here, a large number of nearly-identical complaints contain factual allegations that are contrived, exaggerated, and defy common sense. False or grossly exaggerated claims of injury, especially when made with the intent to coerce settlement, are at odds with our system of justice, and Molski’s history of litigation warrants the need for a pre-filing review of his claims. We acknowledge that Molski’s numerous suits were probably meritorious in part—many of the establishments he sued were likely not in compliance with the ADA.

On the other hand, the district court had ample basis to conclude that Molski trumped up his claims of injury. The district court could permissibly conclude that Molski used these lawsuits and their false and exaggerated allegations as a harassing device to extract cash settlements from the targeted defendants because of their noncompliance with the ADA. In light of these conflicting considerations and the relevant standard of review, we cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in declaring Molski a vexatious litigant and in imposing a pre-filing order against him.

In other words, when the legislature puts the enforcement of the ADA in the hands of disabled individuals without permitting them to recover damages, you can't blame private attorneys for working the market created for the private enforcement of public laws even if you can blame them for the manner in which the market is worked.

So what does this have to do with the settlement of litigation and, in particular ADA Litigation?

Because these accessibility cases always cost more to defend than to settle and because they're often indefensible, the rational business decision is simply to settle the darn things.  

No one, however, wants to be extorted.  And in the few ADA cases I've mediated, it's the principled refusal to pay money at the point of a gun that interferes with a business establishment's willingness to do the economically "rational" thing rather than, say, try it;  appeal it to the Ninth Circuit; and, pursue it to the Supreme Court of the United States.

For those representing defendants who are feeling extorted, I offer my own (previously posted) ADA mediated settlement story below.

Continue Reading...

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Some attorneys and mediators make light of the power of the apology ("it's only about money").  My education, training and experience consistently suggest otherwise.

Today, we learn a lesson in heart-felt apology from Larry Bodine for a post I hadn't seen, but which Bodine himself admits was anti-Semitic.

"Elevator Pitch" Post Deleted I sincerely apologize for the crude and offensive "Elevator Pitch" post I put online last week.  In the clear light of morning, it is clear that it was anti-Semitic and repellent.  I want to thank all the people who commented and called me about it; I listened and took what you said to heart.

If you read on here you'll see that Bodine did not simply say "I'm sorry."  He removed the admittedly offensive post; disowned it; and, empathized with those who found it offensive by sharing his own family's WWII imprisonment story.

As my Second Track International Diplomacy Professor Brian Cox has written in his book Faith-Based Reconciliation

Words that heal include expressions of caring, concern, gratitude and affirmation.  [I]n demolishing the walls of hostility, we must be prepared to examine our own pattern of spoken words and embrace the practice of ethical speech. . . .

Because Bodine himself admitted the anti-Semitic nature of his post, it falls into the category of an identity-based conflict with some or all of his readers.  Though speaking from a religious or "faith-based" viewpoint, I always found Cox' prescriptions for resolution to work equally well from the point of view of secular humanism.  As Cox explains:

A faith-based reconciliation framework applied to an identity-based conflict . . . consists of six basic elements:  imparting moral vision, building bridges between estranged groups, a peace accord, advocacy for social justice, political forgiveness, and healing deep collective wounds.

More particularly, Cox recommends the following specific steps:

1.  Sharing life journeys and building common ground.

2.  Sharing perceptions of the conflict.

3.  Engaging in problem solving.

4.  Sharing how one has caused offense to the other.

5.  Exploring each community's narrative of history and perception of historical wounds.

If you read Bodine's spontaneous apology, you will see all of these elements contained in it.  This is not surprising because apology and attempts to re-build interpersonal bridges are hard-wired into us as toddlers.  As I wrote in "Shame by Any Other Name,"

Shame . . .  "acts as a powerful modulator of interpersonal relatedness and . . . ruptures the dynamic attachment bond between individuals." 30  When an individual has broken this bond, he wishes to recapture the relationship as it existed before it turned problematic. 31 Toddlers shamed by their mothers, for instance, naturally initiate appeals to repair the momentary break in the emotional bond resulting from the shame-inducing behavior. 32 This process is called self-righting. 33 It is natural and universal. 34 The shamed toddler reflexively looks up at and reaches toward his mother. 35 Even a preverbal child will spontaneously express this need to be held in an attempt to reaffirm both self and the ruptured relationship, to feel restored and secure. 36

A healthy and responsive mother accepts and assuages the child's painful feelings of shame, enabling the toddler to return to a normal emotional state, one in which love and trust are ascendant. 37 If the caregiver is "sensitive, responsive, and emotionally approachable," especially if she uses soothing sounds, gaze and touch, mother and child are "psychobiologically reattuned," the "interpersonal bridge" is rebuilt, the "attachment bond" is reconnected, and the experience of shame is regulated to a tolerable emotional state. 38

This may all seem excessively academic.  The point is that we all trespass on the feelings of others; those feelings are critical to our connection with one another; our connection with one another is fundamental to our individual well-being and our survival as a species; the urge toward reconciliation is therefore natural, as are our desire to be forgiven, our spontaneous expressions of remorse, our attempt to explain and normalize our bad behavior (we are all fallible and we have all suffered harm)  and our fellows' willingness to forgive, particularly when we bare ourselves and our histories to one another in the course of our effort to re-establish what joins us and to move beyond that which divides us. 

And for that lesson, we owe thanks to Larry Bodine this evening.

 

 

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Here are my upcoming speaking and teaching engagements in November and January!

I'm baaacccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!!!!!!

Judicate West Neutral and IP ADR Mediator and Blogger Victoria Pynchon.

Coach/Instructor, National Institute of Trial Advocacy: Building Trial Skills
Location: Loyola Law School Los Angeles
City: Los Angeles, CA
Dates: 1/2/2009 - 1/8/2009
Director: Williams, Gary C.

This is a week-long intensive program for new and/or experienced attorneys who need to learn/brush up on their basic trial skills.  If you can take the time, your entire practice will benefit from the experience.

BrightTALK Intellectual Property Summit here! on November 11, 2008 Webcast Free

Negotiating a Settlement in IP Litigation

   12:00 pm
   Presenting Victoria Pynchon, Judicate West, CPR, Settle It Now, IP ADR Blog

And coming soon!  Deposition Skills Training (NITA techniques) at Solo Practice University!!

 

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The first thing we mediators are taught (after digesting the imperative to "be conscious") is that people in conflict need to be in an atmosphere of hope and safety to be able to:  (1)  recognize the point of view of another; (2) be accountable for his/her own "part" in the dispute; and, (3) generate creative solutions to bust past impasse.

This is the reason one of the post categories over at the IP ADR Blog is "Innovate, Don't Litigate," which is the dispute resolution mantra of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

That said,  I am happy to link my readers to The Financial Crisis' Silver Lining over at Harvard Business Publications.

Perhaps the good times are in fact dead. And certainly someone thinking of forming the umpteenth "Web 2.0-widget-to-grab-audience-and-find-advertisers" ought to pause to think whether they really have some kind of defined competitive advantage that can translate into a sustainable business.

But real customers continue to face real problems. And as always, innovators who figure out different ways to solve those problems--and make money doing so--will have opportunities to create new growth businesses. In fact, the creative destruction unleashed by a crisis always opens up opportunities for innovation.

As a simple example, consider a New York based startup called On Deck Capital, Inc. As described in Monday's Wall Street Journal, the company loans money to small businesses. Instead of relying on individual loan officers to pour over episodic financial information and make decisions, the company has an algorithmic approach that uses software to analyze a company's day-to-day activities in a non-obtrusive way to assess credit worthiness. Its loans feature higher interest rates than loans from most banks, but lower than alternative sources.

The company launched in May, and has already distributed $10 million in loans. It has suffered very few defaults. The current credit crisis and hesitancy of many banks to loan to even the best-run small businesses creates substantial opportunity for On Deck to extend its model.

Llssez le bon temps roulez!

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I watched the debate last night with people who support my candidate.  They all also happened to be mediators, so they understand concepts like confirmation bias --the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference, or as a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis.

I've been Twittering (shoot me! this is addictive behavior).  But all behavior has it's "up" side.  The "up" side to following my Twitter network's running real-time commentary of the debate was the exposure of my own (and my friends') confirmation bias.  I have both McCain and Obama supporters in my network and it was as if the two groups were watching entirely different debates.  And they were. 

Because nothing is objective.  Let me repeat that.  Nothing is objective.  Everything we hear, see, touch, smell and taste is filtered through our entirely personal experiences, the collective or "received" reality of the society (micro or macro) in which we live, and interpreted based upon those experiences, which are further complicated by universal cognitive biases and particular core beliefs (our "operating principles").

If nothing is objective, there is no truth beyond that which one has faith in. ("faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.")

Yes, I know, the scientific method.  But you and I don't test our beliefs, opinions, perceptions and conceptions by the scientific method.  We hear, we see, we smell, we taste, we touch and we respond.  We opine.  We believe we are right.

So I said to my friends in the middle of the debate, "we're an example of "confirmation bias" and they took issue with me. And I let it go because I wanted to listen more than to impose my own view of our collective experience.  And I was Twittering, lord help me, with some people who didn't share my bias.

I missed statements made by McCain entirely.  It was if I hadn't even heard them.  I was listening to confirm that which I already believed, which means I screened out what didn't fit my view of McCain or Obama and highlighted those statements that confirmed my existing beliefs.

This is what happens every time you try a case to a jury.  It's why the little "g" god of the market place created jury consultants.  It is also what happens everytime you try to settle litigation.  Litigation raises confirmation bias to holy writ.  Which is why the little "g" god of the market place created mediators.  Why?  Because the client has filtered his opening story through his own subjective experiences, which we, the litigators, devote ourselves to proving by cherry-picking the facts that conform to those experiences and disputing all those that don't.  By the time the parties and their counsel get to me, they're often in different galaxies.  And I need to help them remember, or realize for the first time, that their opponent has woven the disparate facts of "what happened" into an entirely different story, and has done so without "lying" about those events.  Just as importantly, the parties come to understand that a  jury might well "buy" their opponents tale as the "right" one.

Here's the more important point to getting a better deal:   your opponent is often nearly as interested in your acknowledgement that his version of the events might be as accurate as yours as he is in  "winning" the case.  When (or if) the parties clear this hurdle, they can get down to serious horse trading, benefitting both. 

So, forget the pundits.  If you believe your guy "won" last night, it's probably equal parts a measured opinion and a peculiarly subjective experience, one that you do not even know you've tailored to fit your own view of reality.

I like Obama because I believe he acknowledges this from time to time.  Not always.  But often enough to make me feel comfortable with him in a White House.  Am I right?  How could I possibly be?  We won't know anything until one of these men moves from campaigning to governing.

Lord help us all.

 

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Earlier this week I was asked the following question by a concerned General Counsel:  how can we help our employees grapple with on-the-job justice issues without leading them to believe that our proposed solutions are untrustworthy.  

The problem, as eloquently described by a lengthy email posing the question, is one that all employers face, large and small.  For this GC to have thought that mediators might make a difference is particularly heartening on a day when mediator Justin Patten was reporting that mediators are the furthest thing in a UK company's mind when dealing with conflict.  

(above, the work of the brilliant Hugh McLeod)

To understand the depth of the problem posed, I'm providing you with the full email sent to me:   

Victoria:

I just read your blog post of September 15, 2008 regarding Peter Murray's article (which I have not read yet). I was having a discussion today with my Director of Human Resources, and raise a related issue.

Our company spends an inordinate amount of time explaining disability, workers comp and federal employment law to employees who misunderstand what their rights are, or do not give us the right information to help them get the help they need.

Of course, we are the big bad employer, so any information we give them is suspect. I have considered hiring a social worker as a case manager/advocate for these people, but that position would just be interpreted as another tool of the evil employer out to keep them out of work/make them go back to work in violation of their best interests, so it would be a waste.

We would LOVE if there was an independent agency that would assign a case worker, not to work as an attorney for the employees, but as an advocate to help them understand their rights and access the system correctly. I would gladly pay to fund this service.

Then I realized, if the employer, or a group of employers, funded this employee advocacy agency, employees would think the advocates were biased toward the employers and were just in a sham relationship to deprive them of their rights to serve the interest of the employer.

Now, I do not believe this would be the case. I trust in the professionalism and ethics of mediators, but I do believe that uneducated and single users would form that opinion. Professor Murray's opinion reinforces that conclusion, even though at first glance, he would seem to be "educated."

But, is bigger government the answer. My experience with the EEOC is that they want employers to do MORE than is required by law. We have had success with mediators after complaints are filed, but my goal is to get the employees what they need when they need it, not have a mediator help us fix it after time has run out.

What are your thoughts on this?

The Problem as Cognitive Bias

I've highlighted the sections of the GC's email that raise the problem of reactive devaluation -- our tendency to devalue and resist anything our "opponent" offers to us.  Most attorneys were taught reactive devaluation as first year associates -- "if opposing counsel wants it, you don't." 

As the linked article -- Reactive Devaluation in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution -- notes:

One can be led to conclude that any proposal offered by the “other side”—
especially if that other side has long been perceived as an enemy—must be
to our side’s disadvantage, or else it would not have been offered. Such an
inferential process, however, assumes a perfect opposition of interests, or in
other words, a true "zero-Sum" game, when such is rarely the case in real-
world negotiations between parties whose needs, goals, and opportunities
are inevitably complex and varied.

Combatting Reactive Devaluation in the Workforce

Cognitive biases such as reactive devaluation are not random artifacts of an irrelevant evolutionary past.  They are built-in protections against deception by our friends as well as by our adversaries.  There is only one lasting protection against this bias -- to engage in clear communication with your work force on a daily basis concerning the mutual and complementary interests of employer and employee; to express your belief in your interdependence in word and deed, i.e., by engaging in dialogue and activities demonstrating  benevolent intent; and to willingly listen to one another's complaints, understanding that one man's benevolence is another's bondage. 

As recent legal news touching too close to home (the Heller dissolution) bears out, the workplace will not work if the middle or the bottom collapse.  If human resources are your greatest capital asset, attend to the wisdom of Adam Smith Esq. on Heller's recent failure:

"Our assets go down in the elevator every night."

Take that bromide seriously.

You must give people a persuasive reason to come back "home" every Monday morning.they go down the elevator every night and must have a good reason to come "home" the next day. 

Asking Diagnostic Questions and Using Transformative Mediation Methods

I repeatedly tell my clients what I've learned from the academics who teach negotiation strategy and tactics at elite business schools throughout the country -- 93% of all negotiators fail to ask their bargaining partners diagnostic questions the answers to which would dramatically improve the benefits of the bargain to everyone. 

What's a diagnostic question?  One that would reveal our bargaining partners' needs, desires, priorities, preferences and motivations.  I'm no employment expert, but I have participated in the management of law firm personnel as a partner and have been managed by others throughout my professional life.  As a full-time mediator for more than four years, I have also asked hundreds if not thousands of diagnostic questions to help litigation adversaries understand one another's motivations, to reframe those motivations as non-threatening, or, at a minimum, the result of ordinary human fallibility, and to explore the parties' mutual and complementary interests. I also remind my parties and myself as often as possible that you cannot drill a hole in the other guy's side of the boat without making your own side sink to the bottom of the lake as well.

As the transformative mediators who have been most successful in workplace disputes tell us, our job is to assist the parties in moving from fear and powerlessness to accountability and mutual recognition of the interests of the other.

Empowerment, according to [the fathers of the transformative paradigm] Bush and Folger, means enabling the parties to define their own issues and to seek solutions on their own. Recognition means enabling the parties to see and understand the other person's point of view--to understand how they define the problem and why they seek the solution that they do.

(Seeing and understanding, it should be noted, do not constitute agreement with those views.)

Often, empowerment and recognition pave the way for a mutually agreeable settlement, but that is only a secondary effect. The primary goal of transformative medition is to foster the parties' empowerment and recognition, thereby enabling them to approach their current problem, as well as later problems, with a stronger, yet more open view. This approach, according to Bush and Folger, avoids the problem of mediator directiveness which so often occurs in problem-solving mediation, putting responsibility for all outcomes squarely on the disputants.

Rights and Remedies vs. Interests

It's not surprising that employees just don't seem to "get" the legal rights and remedies company HR departments keep trying to explain to them.  They don't make any sense absent legal training.  

People who are not lawyers simply don't understand why there is a legal remedy for one type of injustice but none for another that feels just as unfair.  Let's take our patchwork of Constitutional protections for employees.  As an life-long ACLU member, I'd be the last to denigrate them.  But we have to understand that we've created a "fair" workplace for only some of our citizens, not all of them. 

Women, people over 40, under-represented minorities and the like, can take the square peg of their unfair work treatment and cram it into the round hole of a viable cause of action.  If an employee does not want to cry "gender discrimination" even though she's being treated badly on the job, or if he has no bundle of legal rights to assert, there is no remedy for a termination that feels (yes, feels) wrongful.  Remember, it took us lawyers quite some time for the legal worldview to "click" and we were immersed in it, drilled in it and eager to learn it.  Employees just want someone to listen to their problem and to help them resolve it.  They don't want to know the wage-hour laws, the need to exhaust administrative remedies with the EEOC and the like.  

Employees and employers have people problems with justice issues, not legal problems with "irrelevant" emotional responses that get in the way of resolution. 

Expressed emotion is the key, not the lock. 

It is we -- the lawyers -- who legalize and monetize injustice, shutting our clients down when they try to explain what the problem really is because it's irrelevant to the legal solution.

If you're old enough to remember the lingering moment in United States history when our educational institutions went from white, on the one hand, to multi-hued, on the other, you'll know intimately how you deal with reactive devaluation.  You get to know one another.  Do this and Kaneesha is not "black" or "African American" but a well-known acquaintance or dear friend.  The same is true for employers and employees.  Create activities in which (alleged) oppressor and (purported) oppressed come together to engage in mutually productive (Habitat for Humanity springs to mind) and mutually enjoyable (basketball?  girls nights out?) activities.  At the holiday party, don't relegate the "underlings" to their own table.  Walk your talk.  Destroy the hierarchy everywhere except where it's actually necessary to get work done. 

I can't describe the benefits of interest-based resolutions over rights-based solutions any better than does my mentor and friend, Ken Cloke, in his brilliant new book -- Conflict Revolution.

[r]ights-based processes . . . generate winners and losers, undermine relationships, and result in collateral damage, . . . Since rights rely on rules, change is discouraged, though not prevented, and conflicts are settled rather than prevented or resolved.

This is not easy work. As a mediator, I know how elusive Cloke’s “outcomes” can be

--  outcomes [in which] both sides win and no one loses, when former adversaries en-
gage in meaningful dialogue and reach satisfying agreements, and when power is exercised with and for each other by jointly solving common problems.

I have, I am afraid, given my GC a problem rather than a solution.  More accurately, I've suggested an altered way of looking at the problem without a great deal of detail about crafting a solution.  Not only could people better versed in employee relations write books on this topic, they have.  Therefore, I'm asking my good ADR blogging buddies to please chime in here for you.

Diane Levin?  Geoff Sharp?  Blaine Donais?  Ombuds Blog? John DeGroote?  Nancy Hudgins?  Stephanie West Allen?  Gini Nelson?  Tammy Lenski?

 

 

 

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Geoff Sharp at Mediator blah blah today asks the first academic question with which I was forced to grapple in my LL.M studies at the Straus Institute -- can you cherry pick transformative mediation techniques to settle commercial litigation?  

I realized I had re-entered the academy the day Joe Folger -- author, with Baruch Bush, of The Promise of Mediation -- said only transformative mediation "works" and its principles  must be strictly followed. 

(drawing courtesy of Charles Fincher at LawComix.com)

Why was this an echt academic moment?  Because the course I was taking from Joe -- "Ideologies of Mediation" -- had, before that moment, been suggesting that all ideologies interfere with durable, party-satisfying resolutions.  Now it seemed the problem wasn't with ideology itself but with the wrong ideology.  Hmmm, felt like law school.  Forget Pennoyer v. Neff.  It's all about this Buckeye case with the exploding boiler.

At the time, my litigator husband was skeptical of all mediators and all mediation techniques.  We took a long walk down a Malibu beach after one of Joe's classes while I tormented him with questions about ways in which mediators could help him settle the case he was then working on -- the World Trade Center insurance coverage litigation. 

Frustrated, I interviewed Folger and Bush -- raising Steve's questions -- which I crafted into a Q&A for mediate.com -- Can Transformative Mediation Work in Commercial Litigation?

Later, Ken Cloke (Conflict Revolution) would tell me "you are the technique," opening the door for me to use mySELF to best settlement effect, remembering old lessons while continuing to learn new ones.  See We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.

If you wonder why I'm such a joint session fanatic, it's due largely to Joe's and Baruch's teaching as well as my own experience mediating community disputes locally -- the only place true transformative mediation is practiced.  Engage the people with the problem and you're more than half way home.  You just have to be capable of getting the lawyers to trust you enough to give up just a tiny bit of control to help the process happen.

As another mentor -- Richard Millen -- taught me, people don't have legal problems, "people have people problems" which are burdened with justice issues. 

Choose your mediator wisesly, collaborate with him/her and you will not only settle the case, but emerge with a client who got what he/she/it hired you for -- to resolve the commercial problem and  the justice issue that called for the retention of a lawyer in the first place.

And if you're in the UK, check out Justin Patten's post on small companies missing the benefits of mediation -- complete with an offer of a free consultation. 

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A lessee of commercial office space complains that the common areas are not being properly maintained. The local high school has just banned Catcher in the Rye. Again.  A prestigious law firm fires a first year associate because he refuses to remove his new “tongue stud.” These seemingly disparate disputes have one quite obvious but ill understood characteristic in common – they are all examples of unresolved conflicts that have ripened into discrete disputes.

Pretend for a moment that you never went to law school.  I know.  It's hard.  But give it a shot.

Lawyers (those other people who went to law school) are are trained to understand, manage and remedy all disputes, no matter however different they might be, in a single, highly controlled manner.  

To help their clients deal with the problems mentioned here, lawyers will read the lease; research the latest Supreme Court rulings ("Fuck the draft"); and, study the statutes. Once they understand the facts that are relevant to the law, they “think like lawyers.”

How do they do that?  "Think" like lawyers?

First, they subject the facts and the law to as much scrutiny as any idea can bear before it disintegrates into the dust of first principles. They create a chronology of events, highlighting and tailoring the "story" of the conflict that "fits" the available "causes of action" giving rise to "rights" in their client, obligations in their "opponent" and remedies for the harm suffered.  

This "legal" dispute was once about a relationship between people.   Now it is an "actionable" claim in an extremely controlled process in which one of the parties will "win." 

That, of course, rarely happens because the legal system has become too expensive and the law too uncertain for most people to risk what used to be it's goal -- a jury trial.  

Lawyers recognize frivolous or baseless or "defendable" claims by observing just how uncomfortably the “facts” sit inside their opponent's “causes of action.” When called upon to justify their entitlement to get their client's claim before a jury (demurrers, motions for judgment on the pleadings, summary judgment motions, non-suits) the Plaintiff's attorneys can and will simply change the way the story is told.  They make the facts fit the law.  There's nothing wrong with that.  That's their job.  If the facts won't "fit" the law, lawyers apply themselves to the law's creative expansion. 

What attorneys do not learn in law school is how and why conflict develops into a dispute and then predictably evolves, usually getting more acrimonious and difficult to resolve.

My friends who are lawyers (I never went to law school, remember? and neither did you) tell me that they know how to escalate conflict but not how to de-escalate it.  They also tell me that they see a lot of injustice.  Sometimes the injustice arises because the laws themselves are unjust.  Sometimes the tragic and unfair consequences of human interactions just don't have any legal remedy.  And sometimes the legal process itself makes disputes worse -- more protracted, frustrating and expensive -- rather than better.  

In common law countries, like ours, where the law is forged in the fire of conflict, shouldn't attorneys be taught not only how to "win the case" but also how to dampen the flame?  Most litigators I know would respond with a resounding "no!"   

Conflict resolution that is not "handled" as litigation or arbitration is for some other professional to deal with.  Therapists come to mind.  Don't they help the parties deal with that most uncontrollable aspect of any dispute -- something not only lawyers but the law itself exclude from the legal action?

 Feelings.  Not just sad or mad feelings.  But the type of feelings that make teenagers shoot other teenagers on the streets of Los Angeles.  Feelings of loss, tragically unfair outcomes, powerlessness, rage and despair.

The purpose of this post and the new thread that it is meant to begin?  To start something radical.

If you're not aware of what I'm about to tell you, you should be.

Once a year, 1000 people are invited to the TED Conference in Monterey, California, to exchange something of incalculable value: their ideas. TED's mission statement is as simple as it gets:  

TED is devoted to giving millions of knowledge-seekers around the globe direct access to the world's greatest thinkers and teachers.

You can cruise the jaw-dropping results here.

(image links to the Photography site of Lars Kirchhoff)

I was just talking to a friend over coffee the other day about how we're using 18th Century technology (the jury trial) to solve 21st Century problems.  

Here's the idea.  A legal TED Conference. 

If you'll look at what TED accomplishes, you'll know what I don't mean.  I don't mean a conference to trot out any new/old "ADR" ideas -- mediate this, arbitrate that, create new rules and forms for the lawyers to use. 

No.

I mean creating the highest level think tank we can to first envision and then implement a dispute resolution technology that incorporates what we've learned since we first enshrined the jury trial in our Constitution more than 200 years ago.

I have one man in mind -- Larry Lessig.  But surely there are others.  The first step would be to suggest names for the coordinating committee.

Why do I think of TED?  Because what it envisions cannot be accomplished.  It cannot even be envisioned.  It's a fool's errand.  One I'd be willing to spend the rest of my own life working on.

Would anyone care to join me?

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Orange County Bar Association Alternative Dispute Resolution Section Meeting Reminder

Thursday, September 4, 2008
Noon to 1:30 p.m.
Wyndham Hotel
3350 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa

Speaker:

Victoria Pynchon
Attorney at Law, Mediator
Author of the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog
Judicate West
 

Using and Losing Cognitive Biases to Win Your Next Negotiation

• How common biases prevent us from influencing others, interfere with case analysis, and confound attempts to learn true needs of others
• Learn how to identify specific biases to negotiate better deals for clients

For more information or to register:  Call FastFax at (949) 440-6700, x4 and request document 2279.   Register ONLINE using the OCBA’s online calendar at OCBar.org
 

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If you've been following the conversation between Settle It Now and Max Kennerly's Philadelphia Litigation and Trial Blog, you'll know that a "settlement unicorn" is composed of "two hostile parties on the verge of a lawsuit [who] get lawyers, almost file suit, and then, through deft representation, settle their differences peacefully and move on." 

I believe in Unicorns and Max doesn't so I've promised to keep my eyes open for appearances of that storied creature.  Previously, I have reported the Unicorn's appearance here (community mediation; potential lawsuit, no lawyers); here (litigation + lawyers who send the parties to community mediation); and, here (litigation + lawyers + clients who seek mediation without lawyers to resolve dispute).  

Today, I have a story of the Unicorn visiting the mediation room in a litigated case -- a case of the type that my (new) friend Max Kennerly suggests will not attract that shy beast because: 

The parties to a lawsuit do not have intertwined interests: they have directly adverse interests. Unless there's some possibility of a future relationship, the defendant doesn't want to resolve the conflict: they want the plaintiff to drop their frivolous claim. In their mind, their best alternative to a negotiated agreement ("BATNA") is for the plaintiff to crawl in a hole and die.

[My Comment:  the "intertwined interests" all parties to litigation have is the litigation itself with its attendant cost, delay, and, uncertainty, not to mention the discomfort "ordinary" people experience when plunged into the foreign environment occupied by attorneys with their strange "causes of action" and "affirmative defenses," their demurrers and JNOV's; their res ipsas and, most importantly, their view that only facts pertaining to a "cause of action" or "affirmative defense" are relevant to the injustice suffered by their clients.] 

[T]he plaintiff usually prefers imposing a conflict on the defendant (who the plaintiff believes cast the first stone) in pursuit of justice, an imposition they will only relieve for at least "full" compensation. . . .

The problem is that most parties don't consider their claims to be assets; the problem isn't that there's emotional baggage around the economic understanding, it's that the parties interpret their dispute as fundamentally non-economic.

[My Comment:  I've said before that all litigation is "fundamentally non-economic" -- it's about justice.  Though Max is one of the few practicing litigators who agrees with me, he does not believe in the existence of my solution -- a settlement conference or mediation conducted in joint session].

Hence a Mediation Unicorn with litigation and attorneys prior to any meaningful discovery.

I'm talking to a plastic surgeon whose artistry not only went unappreciated, but which gave rise to a lawsuit for battery and malpractice. 

The plaintiff is a model and an actor.  The surgery, she claims, left permanent scaring on her nose.  Her opening demand is $500,000.  I am trying to persuade the physician, his attorney, and the claims adjuster, not to walk out.  The plaintiff's deposition has been taken and the doctor's is scheduled for the following week.  No experts have been retained.  

The parties have made the rare effort to settle the case early in the litigation.

This is what the defense thinks about the opening demand in response to their good faith participation in an early mediation:  

%&*#%*#%@& and %&^@(% and *&$)*#! 

I am suggesting to the defense in separate caucus that they allow me to conduct a joint session in which the parties can talk about the surgery, the scarring and their post-surgical communications.  I explain that the Plaintiff is more angry than acquisitive.  She believes that the doctor disrespected her when she complained about the scarring. 

He denied that I had a scar.  He was rude and dismissive.  He disrespected me.  He had no bedside manner.  

She is one of the few personal injury plaintiffs who comes right out and says what so many plantiffs feel.  

I want him to suffer.  My attorney says he has to report any settlement in excess of $30,000 to the Medical Board.  I want to make him do that.  I want him to suffer as I have.  It's not about the money.  It's about accountability.  I want him to be accountable.   

The parties resist a joint session and we spend two hours negotiating in the strato- and nano-spheres.  $10,000.  $490,000.  $12,500.  $475,000. 

"We're getting nowhere," says Plaintiffs counsel.  "Tell them we're leaving." 

"The case will never settle.  This is a waste of time for my doctor and my claims examiner.  Tell them we're leaving. The case will never settle.  It simply won't settle.  The case cannot settle." 

Click Your Heels Three Times and Say "There's No Place Like Home."

Attorneys are fond of saying that all mediators do is "keep them in the room."  They might be right, but the difference is the room I keep them in.  It's a mediation room, not a conference room or a deposition room or a courtroom.  It's a room in which I ask the doctor if the feeling he has is something akin to a fish being hooked, pulled up out of the water and thrown onto the deck of someone's boat, gasping.  He cracks a smile for the first time that morning.

It's a room in which I say there must have been a miscommunication, a misunderstanding.  It's a room in which I say to the defense that the Plaintiff feels angry and disrespected.  It's a room in which I caution the Plaintiff that the physician is from a different culture than her own -- one where a doctor does not express empathy but only certainty in his skill and expertise. 

The claims adjuster asks me if I'd been able to see the Plaintiff's scar from where I was sitting -- across a conference room table.  I admit that I could not.  I acknowledge what is patent in the defense room -- the Plaintiff is blindingly beautiful.  A jury is unlikely to award her much in the way of damages.  I have said as much to the Plaintiff.  But she is angry and wants a pound of flesh.

I have another mediation in the afternoon.  I tell the defense we have fifteen more minutes.  The claims adjuster keeps repeating "the case will not settle, the case will not settle, the case will not settle." I take this to mean that the defense very much wants to settle the case. 

"If someone repeats something over and over again," my mentor Ken Cloke taught me, "that is the key to the resolution."  While that might be so, I haven't yet found a way to use that key to open any door.  But it is not really my case to settle.  It's my job to keep them in the room.

"I Want to See the Scar," says the claims examiner.

I wish I could take credit for the following but I cannot.  The Plaintiff's attorney says "why don't they go to the ladies room where my client can show Ms. Y the scar and together they can look at it."

I hear the click of the Unicorn's hooves in the hallway.  The plaintiff's attorney is male.  I don't believe he knows what he's suggesting.  He wants to send two women into one of the safest and most congenial, soul-bonding rooms in all of God's creation -- the women's room.

I know the case will settle.

We are finally in joint session.  The claims examiner says, "I want to tell you that I now see the scar.  I'm sorry I denied it.  We'd like to offer you $X to settle the case."

Did $X settle the case?  No.  But $X + $Y settled the case ten minutes later.

And just around the corner, you could see the shadow of the settlement unicorn rear up on its hind legs in celebration.

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The jig is finally up.  I've been hemming and hawing long enough.  I need to just go ahead and answer Max Kennerly's question whether it's  possible to convene an early settlement conference in which the parties are united in a desire to settle the litigation.  

This is how you know I'm still as much a lawyer as I am a mediator. 

The answer is yes and no. 

But you can help change the "no" to a yes.

That's the hope part.

Here's the dispiriting part --The answer will not become "yes" if the parties continue to primarily engage in position-based distributive bargaining sessions in separate caucuses.  

My own professional experience (and the behavioral research of which I'm aware) suggests that Mr. Kennerly's Unicorn will only come into a room in which an interest-based negotiation is taking place, one in which there is at least one joint session among the baragaining parties.  

But first a story.  

This very morning I failed to settle a very small case that is poised to become a very big case with cross-actions for legal malpractice and malicious prosecution. 

The delta between the Plaintiff's final demand and the defendant's final offer?   

$3,000.

And I offered to throw in half the delta myself by making a contribution to the presidential candidate/s of the parties' choice.  Shock value.

The parties' failure to achieve settlement couldn't have been about money could it?  

(image from The Sphere of Economic Calculation at the Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Why not?  Because it was economically irrational not to settle. Which is not unusual.  Because there is no rational economic man.  Because we are incapable of making a decision in the absence of emotion.  /**  

As Professor Lee Alan Dugatkin explains in his article Discovering That Rational Economic Man Has a Heart,  

Although some economic decisions are made outside a social context, they are a minority. Social dynamics, many economists believe, are at the core of economic decision making—that is, decision-making about resource acquisition and expense allocation. What I decide affects you, what you decide affects me, and, even more to the point, I care how I fare economically compared with how you fare.  

I send a client a bill for $15,000.  He pays $9,000, refusing to pay the additional six because he believes I didn't earn it or that I did my job badly or that I didn't communicate to him all of the items I would naturually include in my bill.  There is a written agreement but no attorney fee clause.  It will cost me at least $3,000 in attorney fees to collect the six.  My client offers to pay me half of what is owed. 

Do you have the hypothetical in mind?  What would the rational economic man do?

The rational economic man would take the $3,000 because he cannot do better at trial.    

Did rational economic man appear at the mediation this morning?  Of course not.  Because he is a Unicorn!  He doesn't make decisions based upon numeric calculations or emotionless cost-benefit analyses -- which is why I knew  the parties would not accept my gap-closing political contribution suggestion (whew!)

Why Rational Economic Man is a Unicorn

In a social-economic experiment known as the Ultimatum Game, many researchers have found that when one party offered less than half the money subject of the game, "the other player often rejected it, even though by doing so he end[ed] up with nothing."  Id.  Dugatkin describes the results of one research project involving this Ultimatum Game as follows: 

 Alan Sanfey, Ph.D., and his colleagues at Princeton University examined the Ultimatum Game with 19 subjects in the role of responder and . . . observe[d] their brain activity. They found that when unfair offers (defined as those of less than half the resource) were made, responders often rejected them. As they did so, the area of their brains associated with negative emotional states (in this case, the bilateral anterior insula), rather than those associated with complex cognition (in this case, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) were most active. The more the offer deviated from fair, the more active was the bilateral anterior insula when such an offer was rejected. Anger at being treated unfairly by other players appeared to override rational economic reasoning. In the minority of cases when the offer was accepted, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was most active.

 We, like the capuchin monkeys mentioned yesterday, will deprive ourselves of thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of dollars if we believe the compensation being offered is so little related to our value or our loss that it seems unfair.  We will not pay money at the point of a gun nor accept money offered to us by villains or cheapskates. 

Mediation, Money and Justice

In today's semi-hypothetical mediation, the $3,000 offered felt too unfair to the plaintiff and the hypothetical $6,000 demanded felt too unjust to the defendant for the parties to reach a rational economic deal.  The parties' potential to achieve settlement was also seriously undermined by the degree of anger they expressed toward one another and the way in which they had villified one another - "rich deadbeat" on one side and "dishonest fiduciary" on the other.

I am neither magician nor miracle worker.  Nor am I in the social work or therapy business.  I do, however, know that when parties to a lawsuit are hopping mad and believe that the opposition behaved immorally, money is unlikely to change hands. 

In an effort to defuse the anger and de-demonize the parties, I held two joint sessions -- one that was not coached and one that was.  Then I separated the parties for the purpose of conducting a distributive bargaining session (she offered x; he counters with y, etc.)

In both the joint session and in the separate caucuses, I strove to humanize the parties for one another; attempted to reframe their behavior in a less villianous light; and, assisted them in conducting as rational a cost-benefit analysis as possible.  I also helped the parties reality test their beliefs about the likely outcome at trial and to evaluate the likelihood that the strength of their feelings today would translate into a hearty appetite for further, higher-stakes litigation two years down the line.  

No dice.

So What Can You Do?

I would love to deliver a stirring tale of a heroic mediator helping parties settle their dispute in the early stages before the threatened action and cross-actions were even filed.  But I can't.  This is more art than science and compared to my 25 years of experience as a litigator, I'm still a little green as a mediator after four years of full-time neutral practice.      

Let me just say this.  Mediating settlements in the early stages works more often than it fails, particularly if you do one or more of the following:

• hire a mediator who can rock and roll with the process rather than one who is a one-trick pony -- head-banger, or evaluator, or prophet of doom; peacemaker, or rabble-rouser or King of the Distributive Bargain -- your mediator should be able to play all or any of these roles as the situation demands;
• if you're angry and if you have villified opposing counsel or the opposition party, take a deep breath, sit down at your computer and write down the best, the mid- and the worst-case scenarios (I know you've done it already; but take a fresh look again right before the settlement conference)
• share these evaluations with your client
• if a trustworthy mediator with whom you've worked before suggests that it would be useful in joint session for your client to express his irritation, disappointment, anger or any other feeling that might interfere with his ability to make a rational decision, don't reject it out of hand 
• help your client de-demonize the opposition, reminding him that the "other side" is human and therefore fallible and is rarely downright evil
• remind your client that many disputes that seem to arise from malicious conduct actually stem from faulty communication
• know your bottom line and stick to it unless you genuinely learn something that makes you see the entire dispute in a different light, remembering that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" 
• despite everything I've now said about litigants behaving irrationally, as I've written elsewhere in greater detail, Harvard negotiation gurus Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman suggest that negotiators too often confuse hidden interests and constraints with irrationality.  The mistakes and solutions when this is the case?  
  • Mistake No. 1: They are Not Irrational; They Have Hidden Interests -- find out what they are and you may well be able to resolve the dispute and settle the litigation without putting any more money on the table or making any further concessions;
  • Mistake No. 2: They are Not Irrational; They Have Hidden Constraints -- keep one ear to the ground for hidden constraints, explore them with the mediator, opposing counsel or the opposing party; often those constraints can be problem-solved away;
  • Mistake No. 3: They are Not Irrational; They Are Uninformed -- listen and respond; respond and listen.  You will find that EACH of you is uninformed about something that will likely make a genuine difference in the manner in which the litigation is resolved.
• If your opponent cannot or will not see reason, there's always the joy of just trying the darn thing.

______________________

**/  This thesis is based on the work of  Antonio Damasio as described by him in Descartes’ Error. 
 

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Max Kennerly over at Litigation and Trial has graciously and profusely responded to our call for comments about the road-blocks to achieving optimal negotiated resolutions to litigated disputes.

Because Max and I are straining toward the same goal every litigant does when the burdens of a lawsuit begin to outweigh its anticipated benefits, I'm going to include my readers in the conversation.

Our Interests are Adverse, Not Mutual or Intertwined

Max suggests that the hypothetical "business school" negotiated resolution doesn't provide litigators with much guidance in resolving litigated disputes because the buyer-seller-mutual-or-intertwined-interest template cannot be comfortably laid over a conflict between parties whose interests are entirely adverse.  As Max explains:  

The parties to a lawsuit do not have intertwined interests: they have directly adverse interests. Unless there's some possibility of a future relationship, the defendant doesn't want to resolve the conflict: they want the plaintiff to drop their frivolous claim. In their mind, their best alternative to a negotiated agreement ("BATNA") is for the plaintiff to crawl in a hole and die.

Same with the plaintiff. Unlike buyers and sellers, who usually don't get much joy out of their 'conflict' as a conflict, the plaintiff usually prefers imposing a conflict on the defendant (who the plaintiff believes cast the first stone) in pursuit of justice, an imposition they will only relieve for at least "full"  compensation. 

The problem is that most parties don't consider their claims to be assets; the problem isn't that there's emotional baggage around the economic understanding, it's that the parties interpret their dispute as fundamentally non-economic. 

Before moving on to adverse/intertwined/mutual interests, I want to emphasize that what the parties "interpret . . . as fundamentally non-economic" is the key to the settlement of litigated disputes -- not a roadblock. 

Nor can the feelings that accompany litigation be called  "emotional baggage" unless we interpret the desire for justice as pathology. 

This hunger for justice is so fundamental to our social relationships that even  primate relatives like  capuchin monkeys will deprive themselves of food if they sense it is being distributed unfairly.  In capuchin monkey land, injustice appears to consist of being required to do five times more work to "earn" the same benefits as another.  

People seek out lawyers rather than therapists to resolve the emotional issues that accompany conflict -- because they believe themselves to be victims of  injustice and lawyers are in the justice business.  Our clients have not simply suffered an injury (tripped over their own feet) but have a wrong (stumbled over a trip wire placed in their path by a malicious or careless actor).  We can explain until we're blue in the face that money is the only remedy the law can provide.  Our clients will continue to seek justice and will not easily settle for money alone.  

"The Unicorn Settlement"

Max asks that I acquaint him with the Unicorn -- the state "where two hostile parties on the verge of a lawsuit get lawyers, almost file suit, and then, through deft representation, settle their differences peacefully and move on" Unicorns. Excluding business disputes where the parties have an existing and potentially mutually beneficial on-going relationship, this type of settlement, says Max, is a myth.  He explains:

I entered the law expecting The Unicorn to be rare but real; by this point, I have been trained by defense lawyers not to bother to check for it. I still usually do, throwing out what I think is a perfectly reasonable offer early on, which is routinely ignored or dismissed by a letter that gratuitously refers to my claims as baseless, frivolous, or made in bad faith.

So that's my biggest question to you: how do you suggest I get defendants, prior to the courthouse steps, to even enter the mindset that there's a valid claim and mediation / settlement should be considered? Reframed in words closer to your post: what can I do to (a) get the joint session to happen and (b) ensure everyone's in the right mindset?

The Conditions in Which Unicorns Flourish

When I started practice -- in 1980 -- I did so in a small community -- Sacramento -- where everyone was a "repeat player" with everyone else.  Perhaps more importantly, you could file a suit in year one and try it to a jury in year two.  Not only defense counsel, but insurance adjusters, knew which plaintiffs' attorneys would try cases and which would not.  They also knew which ones could persuade a jury to bring back a hefty award.    

Though I only handled personal injury litigation for my first two years of practice (after which I changed firms and moved on to commercial litigation) I saw dozens of "unicorns" in my first few months of practice.  As the junior-most attorney in a small P.I. practice, I settled hundreds of cases without ever filing a lawsuit -- on the telephone with insurance adjusters.  (A really, really good reason to leave PI practice, but that's another story). 

I settled these cases in the world of "three times specials" at a time when and in a place where everyone knew one another and used a common metric to evaluate potential liability and damages.  In that environment, Unicorns flourished.

Unicorn Hunting in the 21st Century

Max isn't asking me to shoot ducks in a barrell here.  He's asking me to deliver the holy grail of mediation -- how to convene an early settlement conference in which the parties (and their attorneys) are united in a desire to settle litigation without protracted discovery or pre-trial procedural wrangling.  

I hate to keep leaving my readers on the edge of a satisfactory resolution, but I DO have work to do and will return to this -- and Max's further observations -- soon, really soon.  Stay tuned.  And join the conversation by leaving your own comments here.

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(photo from Wikimedia Commons -- an Example of What Does Make Us Happy -- Mastery, Accomplishment, Pride, Team Effort, and, yes, Winning (though winning is an emotional high that has a short half-life) 

Consider this a place marker to provide a plain English version of the Prospect Theory link I gave you yesterday.  While you're waing, here's a reminder of a fact we ofen cite here.

psychological research [concerning] happiness . . . . finds subjective measures of wellbeing are relatively stable over time, even in the face of large increases in wellbeing (Easterlin, 1974; Frank, 1997)

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I have alot more to say about this but for the moment am simply linking you to an article at Cognitive daily demonstrating the known fact that you are far more likely to persuade another if you are making eye contact with him.  

And still opposing parties resist sitting in the same room with one another when attempting to settle litigation!

There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze.

For full article, click here.

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There's been some salacious commentary (such as WAC's Like a Vixen) about Blawg Review # 171.  I just want to say to anyone who missed the sexual revolution -- on either side of the generation gap -- we're sorry to have started it all.  We just never really left high school.

We've also heard some complaints that the most recent Blawg Review is just too darn long.  In honor of our sister blog and those attorneys who are still billing 2400 hours/year, we give you the IP Executive Summary of the Virgin Blawg Review #171 below. 

Isaac Newton.  The Straight Dope thinks the virginity of this octogenerian scientist and mathematician is less surprising that the fact that the math gene somehow keeps perpetuating itself.   We consecrate Newton's virginity to this week's best IP and IT posts.  William ("I am virginal") Patry is asking questions about the government's engagement in copyright infringement  but it is  Patry's final blog post that we celebrate as a true virginal moment.  Pause here.  

My late mother, aleha ha-shalom, told me repeatedly that I had a religious obligation to learn every day, and I have honored her memory by doing exactly that. Learning also involves changing how you think about things; it doesn't only mean reinforcing the existing views you already have. In this respect, Second Circuit Judge Pierre Leval once said that the best way to know you have a mind is to change it, and I have tried to live by that wisdom too. There are positions I have taken in the past I no longer hold, and some that I continue to hold. I have tried to be honest with myself: if you are not genuinely honest with yourself, you can't learn, and if you worry about what others think of you, you will be living their version of your life and not yours.

Other IP bloggers have, of course, reflected on Patry's Final Blog Words here and here. 

Back in the worldly word, Patently O -- which promiscuously shares itself with millions of readers every year -- turns its pen over to David McGowan who discusses why we should not interpret the recent Quanta decision too broadly.  Lou Michels suggests we be the masters of our own domains, using the the recent San Francisco IT fiasco as a cautionary tale -- don't let a single person have control of all the keys to your kingdom.

 

We've heard tell that reading your iPhone has replaced the cigarette for post-coital bliss, in which case you'll be glad to hear Brett Trout at BlawgIT suggest that you might soon be watching television from that device.  Protection, protection, protection.  In a software license, boilerplate integration and non-reliance terms might not insulate a firm from claims based upon its salesfolks "over"promises.  Elsewhere, at least one IP Blogger wonders whether blog content licensing might be dying for lack of buyers? (people pay for Blog content while I give it away for free?????)

The IP Dispute of the Week, of course, is Hasbro's suit against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla for their Facebook hit Scrabulous.  Scrabble itself was invented during the Depression by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect.  How did he do it?  As the New York Times explained in its review of Steve Fastis book, Word Freak (Zo. Qi. Doh. Hoo. Qursh) Scrabble's inventor assumed that the game would work best if the game letters  "appear[ed] in the same frequency as in the language itself."  So he

counted letters in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post to calculate letter frequencies for various word lengths. Playing the game with his wife, Nina, and experimenting as he went along, Butts carefully worked out the size of the playing grid (225 squares, or 15 by 15), the number of tiles (100), point values for the letters, the placement of double- and triple-score squares, the distribution of vowels and consonants, and so on.

In response to the Hasbro lawsuit Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion asks "How Many Points is Infringement?" -- one of those rare legal questions that actually has an answer rather than 20 more questions.     

If Player 1 opens with "fringe" (double word) for 24 points; Player 2 follows by slapping an "i" on the triple word score followed by an "n" for "infringe" and 33 points; and, Player 1 responds with "ment" for 19 points, the combined score for "infringement" is 75 points. Our readers can do the math and moves on "trademark" and copyright." 

On the matter of greater moment --  Will the ax fall on Scrabulous -- Jonathan Zittrain at The Future of the Internet answers his own question in the affirmative based on the name alone, opining that by calling it "rainbows and buttercups” instead of “Scrabulous” there’d be little claim of brand confusion but noting the "residual claim that the Scrabulous game board infringes the copyright held in the Scrabble game board."  More on Scrabulous and its replacement with Word Scraper at the Video Game Law Blog here. (Mr. Thrifty's and my first game of Word Scraper here!) 

Has anyone recently said God bless the best IP aggregator in the universe -- the IP Think Tank's Global Week in Review?  This week IPTT points to the following posts on the Hasbro Scrabble debacle -- (Spicy IP), (Techdirt), (The Trademark Blog), (Out-Law), (Law360).  While we're talking IP aggregation, check out Patent Baristas' regular Friday IP Round-up.  All around aggregators include Anne Reed's (Deliberations) reading list and Kevin O'Keefe's LexMonitor.

Both Geoff Sharp and I picked up 8 impediments to settling patent cases on appeal (a desire for "justice" is not an impediment but a means to settlement).  While we're taking an ADR angle, Virtually Blind's post Second Life Lawsuit Avoided; Law is Cool's Love, Actionable; and,    Slashdot's recommend reading of the week (The Pragmatic CSO) are all well worth a look.  

Slashdot also reminds us that IP prevention is worth a pound of IP litigation with the post WB Took Pains to "Delay" Pirating of the Dark Knight as follows: 

"a new studio tactic [is] not to prevent piracy, but to delay it . . . Warner Bros. executives said [they] prevent[ed] camcorded copies of the reported $180-million [Dark Knight] film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours. Although that doesn't sound like much progress, it was enough time to keep bootleg DVDs off the streets as the film racked up a record-breaking $158.4 million on opening weekend. .  . The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks.'"

If you're sufficiently virginal to believe in magic, check out the Law and Magic Law Blog's announcement of the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit against Magic Mag as protected opinion while Ernie the Attorney has at least one more make to make your iPhone magic here.

Meanwhile, the Legal Talk Network gathers together bloggers and co-hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi to welcome Attorney Kevin A. Thompson from the firm Davis McGrath LLC, and Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society to discuss Viacom's suit against Google's YouTube for the violation of its copyrights in a $1 billion lawsuit.

Because I used to type patent applications for Uniroyal (IBM Selectric - 5 carbon copies) I get a sweet whiff of nostalgia from Wiki Patents -- like this one -- Flexible Row Redundancy System 7404113 -- a row redundancy system is provided for replacing faulty wordlines of a memory array having a plurality of banks. The row redundancy system includes a remote fuse bay storing at least one faulty address corresponding to a faulty wordline of the memory array . . . .  Another available data base for the engineering-attorney crowd is the subject of  Securing Innovations post IBM Technical Disclosures' Prior Art Data Base.  Concurring Opinions covers IP in the News this week, Peter Zura's 271 Patent Blog considers a patent that was a "Colossal Waste of Time" and  IP Kat curls up with Small and Sole.  

Next week, the Blawg Review will be hosted by the Ohio Employer's Law Blog which we expect will be far more respectful of BR's readers' political, religious and sexual sensitivities than this one was.  Thanks for letting us play.  And a very, very, very good night!

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Who negotiates revenge? 

Lawyers, of course. 

In the criminal law, the negotiation ends either in a plea bargain or the Best Alternative to it -- trial.

Most civil lawyers don't think about revenge much.  When settling a case, however, they should understand their clients' desire for vengence if they want to break past the psychological impasse to giving up the ultimate reward in a society based upon the law -- vindication of a party's  position and punishment of the opposition by way of a jury verdict.

Today, the New York Times -- in Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye by Patricia Cohen -- brings us a better way to understand the primal need for vengence which, it seems, is based not only on our "human nature" but also on our acculturation and personal experience. 

Even Dr. Melfi wants revenge in a world where the "justice system is %$^#'ed up."

 

The good news for countries clinging to the rule of law (as we are despite the recent assaults upon it) is as follows:

vengeful feelings are stronger in countries with low levels of income and education, a weak rule of law and those who recently experienced a war or are ethnically or linguistically fragmented. Anthropologists tend to believe that vengeful feelings were useful in binding a family or group together in early human society. They were protective devices before states were established and did the job of punishing wrongdoers.

Check out the full article here.  H/T to Marginal Revolution here.

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Thanks to David R. Donoghue at the Chicago IP Litigation Blog for picking up my recent Daily Journal article on the Dangers of Email in Litigation and running with it in A Call for Face-to-Face Communication in Litigation.  As David comments:

It is no surprise that increased aggression in a naturally aggressive proceeding has negative consequences. For example, parties that often meet for the first time at a mediation or settlement conference arrive not trusting or respecting each other, making resolution much more difficult. Pynchon suggested a somewhat radical solution to the email problem -- live meetings with opposing counsel. She suggested that you routinely have live meetings with opposing counsel throughout the course of a litigation, including perhaps even doing some meetings over a meal. The face-to-face contact would generate the trust and respect needed to resolve issues that always arise during a litigation. I have always advocated live meetings with co-counsel in a multi-party litigation. Email communications (or even conference calls) tend to get out of hand and the parties tend not to pay enough attention to others' positions. I am going to expand that practice to opposing counsel.

One other thought, that I do not know if Pynchon will agree with. Those who still avoid email and continue using letters as a main communication means are not off the hook. I started practicing when letters, not emails, were how you communicated with opposing counsel. Those letters tended to be far more aggressive than the attorneys were in a live conversation. And I suspect people tended to read extra aggression into the letters they received. I do not know if aggression is stronger in emails than letters, but the same problem exists whether you hit send, hit print or use a pen to write to opposing counsel.

Looking for help with your communication skills?  Though directed at teachers, here is a list of Six Ways to Improve Non-Verbal Communication Skills that will assist lawyers and their clients in resolving conflict face-to-face. 

 

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This story occurs in the spring of 2001, in a hotel room in Toronto, at 3 a.m., the morning of a deposition I've been preparing to take of an aging petrochemical engineer.

2001 is a  year I'd dreamed of since elementary school.  But the technological changes predicted in the science fiction of my childhood and adolescence are nothing like the "hi-tech" I'm living with now.  

 There are no one-man jets cruising the skies; no robots running my errands or cooking my dinner; no tele-transportation; and, on the political scene (it's not yet 9/11) no Big Brother. 

My personal 2001 "future" is mostly about my instantaneous access to information and "real time" communication via the "killer app" -- email -- telegraphic, spontaneous, unnuanced, and about to get me in a great deal of trouble.  (See Vanity Fair's must-read oral history of the internet here.)  

There's an associate back in Los Angeles, you see, the quality of whose work and the strength of whose dedication to the case at hand is in alarming decline.  More troubling, his work is deteriorating at the same time I'm taking old fashioned passenger jets from province to province to take the testimony of as many witnesses still living who know how 500+ toxic waste sites got that way in the first place.    

Did I say it's 3 a.m.?  The associate I'm thinking about failed to get me the outline I need for tomorrow's deposition on time -- or at all.  The "hard copies" that were supposed to be waiting for me when I arrived at the hotel have gone missing.  I'm tired.  I'm hungry.  I'm lonely.  And I'm angry. 

Worst of all, I'm composing an email to my  associate about my considerable disappointment in his recent performance.  There is a moment, a split second, in which my finger hovers over the "send" button while a rational voice in my head says "no."  Then I push "send."

Email Makes Settlement More Difficult  

More and more often when I'm meeting counsel on the morning of a mediation, they're also meeting one another for the first time.  In fact, they often have not even previously spoken to one another unless they've met in Court ("good morning, counsel") or in depositions (eyes averted; objections made).  Increasingly, by far the vast percentage of their communications have taken place via email.  

And that's a problem. 

Conflict Escalation

There's no question that litigation escalates whatever conflict existed when our client first walks in our door.  We don't, after all, make requests.  We issue demands.  We don't seek concessions.  We insist upon them.  We don't make inquiries.  We require responses.  And we're not such great listeners.  Rather, we impatiently tap our feet in Court, waiting for counsel to finish his argument (which we've heard dozens of times before) so we can press our case.

Are these bad things?  Not necessarily.  So long as we understand what we're doing and the likely results our conduct will have, escalation is not necessarily worse than maintaining a steady state or even deescalating conflict.  

The problem for most of us is that we don't know what we're doing and we don't understand the breadth and depth of the likely repercussions.  

In Conflict Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of E-Mail Communication, author Raymond A. Friedman of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University quotes conflict specialists Rubin, Pruitt and Kim on the difficulties caused by escalation tactics and strategy.  According to Rubin, et al., escalation is 

"an increase in the intensity of a conflict as a whole.”  Escalation is important . . . because when conflict escalates it “is intensified in ways that are sometimes exceedingly difficult to undo.”  One reason why escalated conflicts are so hard to undo is that when more aggressive tactics are used by one side they are often mirrored by the other side, producing a vicious cycle.

Email, Friedman argues, unnecessarily, and often drastically, escalates conflict in ways none of us fully appreciate.  Unlike conversation -- in person or by telephone -- we are not

physically present with others, can’t see their faces or hear their voices, and can’t give or get immediate responses. The lack of contextual clues . . . impose high “understanding costs” on participants in e-mail interactions, making it harder to successfully ground the interaction. . . . /*  [T]the inability to carefully time actions and reactions . . . makes communication less precise.  

E-mail Not Only Lacks Social Clues, it is "Profoundly A-Social." 

Sitting in my Toronto hotel room at 3 a.m., reviewing online documents for tomorrow's deposition and now "penning" an email to my errant associate, I am, argues Friedman, not simply making communication more difficult, I have become "profoundly asocial" as my associate will also likely be when he reviews my email the following day.  "E-mails," writes Friedman,

are typically received and written while the writer is in isolation, staring at a computer screen – perhaps for hours at a time, so that awareness of the humanness of the counterpart may be diminished.

As evidence, Friedman cites research in which subjects played the "prisoner's dilemma" game against a computer.  Not only did the gamers act asocially in this context, "many continued to act asocially even when told that they were now playing with people (through the computer)."

E-mail, Friedman concludes, "often occurs in a context devoid of awareness of human sensibilities."

The Precise Difficulties Caused by E-Mail Communications?

Use of aggressive tactics. If e-mail communication encourages the use of more aggressive tactics during a dispute, or makes a counterpart’s tactics appear more aggressive, then escalation will be triggered.

Changes in view of other. Escalation is more likely if e-mail causes negative changes in psychological processes (e.g., perceptions and attitudes) towards the other, such as (1) seeing the other as unfair, (2) lessening empathy toward them, (3) increasing deindividuation and anonymity, or (4) or seeing the other as immoral.

Weakened interpersonal bonds. If e-mail weakens social bonds with the other, then escalation is more likely (e.g., due to reduced inhibitions for aggression).

Problems are difficult to resolve. If the communication limitations of e-mail (e.g., asynchrony deficits) make problems more difficult to solve, conflict may be escalated as frustrated disputants move from mild to more aggressive strategies to achieve their goals.

As a result, says Friedman, there are "higher rates of escalation when disputes are managed via e-mail than via face-to-face communication or other relatively rich media . . . such as telephone conversations." /**

Back in Los Angeles the Following Day

You knew this story was not going to have a happy ending.  What a cranky, tired, stressed partner types into her computer at 3 a.m. and what a fully awake associate reads with his morning coffee the following day are, as Friedman stresses, two quite different things.  And though I've rarely had a face-to-face disagreement with a colleague that cannot be mended by further communication, apologies, explanations and the like, this particular communication caused a rift that I was unable to heal.

This experience from several years ago, coupled with my recent mediation experiences, makes me want to advise, exhort, plead, beseech, entreat and pray that you commence every litigation with a telephone call rather than a "demand" letter or email.  And that you continue to communicate with opposing counsel by telephone or, even more radically, in person over a meal, throughout the litigation to make sure channels of communication are as open and clear as possible.

The difficulties saved will not only benefit your personal life (reduce stress, increase fellow-feeling and the like) but will benefit your client as well -- in case efficiencies and better settlements all around.     

 

______________________

*/  "Grounding" is the process 

by which two parties in an interaction achieve a shared sense of understanding about a communication and a shared sense of participation in the conversation. Grounding is important because “speech is evanescent...so Alan must try to speak only when he thinks Barbara is attending to, hearing, and trying to understand what he is saying, and she must guide him by giving evidence that she is doing just this."

** /  There's much more to be learned from this article, but these highlights should tell you whether further reading is in your interest or worth your time.  

The title?  The Firesign Theater here.

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It's Sunday . . . and since I inadvertently celebrated my own little Brain Week here, I thought I'd give you something extraordinary to watch . . . it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with negotiation!

UPDATE:  As you can see from the link in my friend Stephanie West Allen's comment below (she blogs on neuroscience and the law at Brains on Purpose) there's considerable controversy about the brain science recounted in this arresting presentation. 

This presentation caused me a little cognitive dissonance because my own experiences (1969-1971 -- I'm sure the statute of limitations has run) with psychedelics as well as those described by others (see Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception */) duplicate Bolte-Taylor's to a T.  As I watched this with the friend who introduced it to me yesterday I kept thinking "psychedelics don't act only on the right or left part of the brain, so what's the deal here?"  

I'll take the left-brain/right-brain description metaphorically.  Since I'm not a brain scientist, the science described, right or wrong, doesn't get in the way of my appreciation for the described experience. 

Once you open this particular "door of perception" you can find your way back to it by way of meditation.  As Huxley wrote:

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

From the TED site:

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ...

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the "Singin' Scientist."

"How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career."   Jill Bolte Taylor

________________

*/  The title comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

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(right, our ancestor, built for fighting)

In How to bargain with aliens, Marginal Revolution asks its readers the following questions:

 Let's say you meet up with an alien race and you need to bargain with them by radio or some other method of signaling. You don't have any other information other than your knowledge of human beings. What traits should you think are overrepresented in humans, relative to what a rerun of evolution can be expected to produce in an intelligent being? Would you expect them to be more or less benevolent than humans?  Should it matter if they have demonstrated superior technology? Should such achievement make you think they are more or less cooperative toward "outsiders"?

I suspect that all of these questions are meant to lead to the conclusion that "people" from more advanced civiliations would naturally be more peaceful, less aggressive and more cooperative with one another than we are. 

Why?  Because scientific and technological advancement occurs more quickly and is less prone to error if researchers are collaborating with rather than trying to "scoop" one another..

And the traits that are "overrepresented" in human beings?  Aggression of course.  As reported last year in MSNBC's Technology and Science column:

Even though [our primate forbears the] ustralopiths walked upright on the ground, they retained short legs for 2 million years for the same reason squatness helped out other great apes—for male-male combat. With the advantage in combat, short-legged primates would likely be victorious and gain access to females. That meant passing their genetic traits, like shortness, to offspring.

Could intelligent human beings have evolved without aggression?  Certainly. 

Chimps vs. Bonobos.

Over at theIP ADR Blog, */ we quoted author Nicolas Wade's 2003 comparison between the aggressive, violent, male-dominated, territory defending style of the chimpanzees with the gentler ways of the bonobos as follows:

researchers Male[] and female[] [chimpanzees] do not associate in families but in separate hierarchies. Males make females defer to them, with violence whenever necessary, and every female is subordinate to every male.

A female chimp advertises her fertile period with a visible swelling and is then so pestered by males that she may get to eat only at night. . . .

Though bonobos are almost as aggressive as chimps, they have developed a potent reconciliation technique -- the use of sex on any and all occasions, between all ages and sexes, to abate tension and make nice.

Assuming the common ancestor of people and chimps had social behavior that was essentially chimplike, how much of that behavior has been inherited by people? The unusual behavioral suite of male kin bonding and lethal territorial aggression may look as if it has been inherited with little change. Among the Yanomamo, a South American tribe, the number of males who die from aggression is about 30 percent, the identical rate found among Gombe chimps.

Dr. Wrangham said the consistent pattern of aggression seen at all the chimp sites suggests that male chimps have ''a strong emotional disposition'' to be aroused by the sight of strange males, to form coalitions against enemies, to be sensitive to balances of power and to be attracted to hunting. The same disposition could have been inherited down the human lineage.

Turns out Freud was right.  Aggression is all about sex.  But it's also about tool-making (i.e., weaponry).  So we have evolved to be competitive and collaborative.  Tool making to ease our work-load and to kill our "enemies."  So far, our advances continue to outpace our many attempts to destroy ourselves.

What might have worked for the advancement of other civiliations?  If all possible worlds exist, as physicists claim, other worlds may well have developed life in some way other than evolutionarily.  Maybe by intelligent design!  There's simply no telling.  I would, however, speculate that a species taste for its members blood must be balanced by affiliative instincts and activities or its development would be cut short by species-cide.

The take-away for negotiators who are strangers in a strange land?

Learn how to communicate with the aliens.  Ask them questions concerning their needs, interests and desires.  Tell them about your own.  Put down your weapons and back slowly away.

Anyone who is as fascinated by these questions as I am, read this post from Such is Life about whether or not we'd "see" aliens if they arrived on our shores.  Answer?  Not likely.  

______________________

*/ And, no, the accompanying photo there is not from Judge Kosinzski's stash.

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Thanks to Slashdot for picking up an item from the Wall Street Journal -- Get Out of Your Way -- showing that we make up our minds 10 seconds before we let ourselves know it.

Experiments with the usual brood of university undergraduates (read about them here) revealed that

our best reasons for some choices we make are understood only by our cells. The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.

Trial lawyers know this, right?  Anne Reed?  You there?

Mom always said I thought too much.  And Dutch researchers are proving her right (another one for you, mom!)

Dutch researchers . . . recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

Here's another lesson I learned nearly thirty years ago in law school that the researchers are only now proving -- you just have to feed your brain the information and then, literally or figuratively go to sleep.  Start writing and you will write your way into the solution that your brain already knew.

(I also used this technique preparing the depositions of technical expert witnesses -- petrochemical engineers, statisticians and the like)

The Take Away for Negotiators?

Prepare.  Ask questions.  Have a firm bottom line (or, better yet, fool yourself into believing your bottom line is less or more than it already is). 

Then rock and roll! 

The more you negotiate (try it at your local retail store) the better your mind will become at improvising the moves necessary -- in the commpletely unpredictable present -- to get what your brain already knows you really want.

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According to writer and surgeon Atul Gawande's recent article The Itch, the way the pepper tree in my back yard appears from my bedroom window may be as much as ninety percent memory and only ten percent "data."   As Gawande writes: 

Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of the bark -- attributes that we perceive instantly. 

In other words, perception is not merely reception.  "Objective reality" is just the brain's "best guess" about what the eyes observe, the ears hear and the fingers touch.

(image:  Phantom Limb #2 by Lynn Hershman) 

"The images in our mind," Gawande explains, "are extraordinarily rich."

We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor -- a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

Gawande doesn't explain how we manage to agree on anything with such impoverished perceptual abilities and richly imagined constructs of "objective reality."   I suspect that our insatiable urge to tell one another stories is the primary way we create the collective memories that allow us to agree upon such simple "facts" as "the apple is red and somewhat round," if not necessarily that "the blue Kia entered the intersection after the traffic light turned red."  

What strikes me about Gawande's article is not so much the pure science described there, but the way in which opposing parties in litigation resemble "phantom limbs" and joint sessions the mirrors used by physicians to treat the pain "felt" in them.       

Recent research demonstrates that amputees' phantom limb pain can be reduced or eliminated by "fooling" the brain into believing that the missing limb is "well."  When researchers asked amputees to put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside and to then move "both" arms, 

[t]he patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. . . .

. . . here’s what the new theory suggests is going on: when your arm is amputated, nerve transmissions are shut off, and the brain’s best guess often seems to be that the arm is still there, but paralyzed, or clenched, or beginning to cramp up. Things can stay like this for years. The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.     

Litigation separates the parties from one another as radically as an amputation, often under circumstances where the law suit is all they have in common.  Like amputees, the parties cannot massage the missing muscle, scratch the irritating itch, or ease the frustrating pain.           

When physicians give their patients mirrors and instruct them to move their one remaining arm in concert with its physically re-imagined partner, they conduct a silent concert of healing.  With "new" information (hey! there's my other arm and it's not all cramped up!) the brain readjusts and stops sending false signals.  The muscle relaxes.  The itch is scratched.  The pain is relieved.  

Joint sessions can be used as mirrors to make missing disputants appear again./*  The mediator -- who is trained in this art -- creates an environment (the "box") in which the parties are able to adjust the mis-impressions and correct the mis-communications that make the conflict so difficult to resolve. After a brief period of discomfort and incoordination, the disputants begin to tell their stories of injustice in concert, spontaneously harmonizing the points on which there is little disagreement and resolving those parts of the tale where the greatest differences lie. 

Those parts of the story that have grown wildly distorted in the absence of any corrective influence, are shrunk back to their appropriate size.  Freed from the tyranny of their phantom "others,"  the parties begin to work collaboratively to solve the problem that they now understand is mutual.  

Though this is surely metaphor, the process is not just theory.  When parties consent to a joint session orchestrated by the mediator in collaboration with their attorneys, this type of reconciliation happens more often than not.  

Don't, however, confuse this joint session with those in which attorneys  give one another presentations proving their entitlement to victory as if there were a phantom "decider"  -- a missing arbitrator or judge -- somewhere behind a curtain.  These are the type of "joint sessions" that have given joint sessions a bad name because counsel well know their opponents' "positions"and the parties tend to become less rather than more amenable to settlement when their opponents' point of view is once again argued to them -- this time in quarters that are far too close for most lawyers, let alone their clients. 

We'll keep exploring this issue.  For now, more of the Gawande article below.  

A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain. . . .

[There are] some serious flaws in the direct-perception theory—in the notion that when we see, hear, or feel we are just taking in the sights, sounds, and textures of the world. For one thing, it cannot explain how we experience things that seem physically real but aren’t: sensations of itching that arise from nothing more than itchy thoughts; dreams that can seem indistinguishable from reality; phantom sensations that amputees have in their missing limbs. And, the more we examine the actual nerve transmissions we receive from the world outside, the more inadequate they seem.

Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’s the same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.

Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished  . . .

________________________

*/   I don't know if any of this relates to mirror neurons, but I am certainly led to think about them.  See Stephanie West Allen's post Mirror Neurons, Some Resources here.  Whenever I see the word "mirror" I'm also always moved to think of my friend, the artist and mediator Dorit Cypis.  For more on her work, click here.

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The cost of a thing is the amount of life that you must exchange for it -- now or in the long run (Thoreau)

• if you have an on-going relationship -- even as limited as a note payable -- squeezing the last nickel out of the deal may impair your bargaining partner's ability to perform 
• what goes up, must come down, i.e., squeezing out the last nickel creates enemies who  none of us can afford when times are good, let alone when times are bad 
• taking advantage of another's weaknesses tears at the social fabric
• it makes us all more watchful and less productive
• it doesn't actually feel good to line your pockets with the misery of others
• sometimes the downtrodden rise up -- every couple of centuries or so, creating an entirely new order -- the generous man and woman will not be on the wrong side of that revolution
• global warming -- think about it -- the order will change as will the countries who will be asking for favors
• you reap what you sow (I'm pretty sure I learned this in Sunday School)
• social relations do not exist "out there" -- they are co-created by one person's relationship with every other person -- the society you inhabit is the one you create -- if you don't want your neighbor taking your last dime, don't take his
• collaborative effort results in greater progress than individual activity -- if you decrease trust, you impede advancement in business, the arts and science

Readers!  Can I count on you to give us all more reasons?

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Here are a few S.A.T. questions for the legal community:  

1. how is the relationship between adult sexuality and prurient sexual interest like that between a dispute and litigation?  
2. Is our interest in Kozinski's sexual interests itself prurient, i.e., are we inordinately interested in Kozinski's presumed "inordinate[] interest in matters of sex." ?  
3. And what type of interest is inordinate?

"Inordinancy" is not, I think, a matter of time but of focus.  One's sexual interests might be classfied as  prurient if they are stirred by a single act, item or physical characteristic and disregard the humanity of the object of one's desire.  In feminist terms, pornography objectifies people, elevating their parts above the sum of their parts and using them to satisfy our own -- but not their -- desires.          

And how is pornography like litigation, Ms. Pynchon?

I've said this on too many occasions already.  Litigation takes the texture, depth, dimensionality, and moral ambiguity out of disputes for the purpose of achieving what Justice Kozinski himself defines as justice:  the application of the law to facts without regard to the outcome in a particular case.  Kozinski wrote concisely and movingly about this business of applying the law to the facts in his Slate Diary, published in 1996 and republished on on the occasion of his public de-pantsing.  

After more than 10 years as a judge of this [Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal] I find that the flow of cases begins to resemble a moving train, with each window revealing a still life of an individual human drama. The sheer volume of cases, and the fact that we rarely see the faces of the participants--just written words on paper and, sometimes, the arguments of lawyers--makes it difficult to remember that there are human beings somewhere looking to us with hope and yearning for a decision in their favor. The law, too, is quite complex. Cases often turn on legal technicalities that bear only a tangential relationship to concepts such as fairness and equity. Justice, we tell ourselves--and I do believe this--is done if the law is applied without regard to the outcome in a particular case.

The artifacts of litigation -- usually called "briefs" and sometimes sprung into life as depositions or trial testimony -- make a fetish of one or more aspects of a complex human drama.  Litigation sucks the people out of the play, requiring both litigants and attorneys to objectify and demonize one another.  By the time the "case" is ready to be "mediated" or "settled," the people with the problem often feel as if they long ago watched the litigation train leave with someone else's story in it -- that the "still-life" Kozinski observes at a glance through the moving window has little to do with the people and a lot to do with process.  

Are we interested in knowing one another?  Would a genuine interest in the man Kozinski be more satisfying, finally, than the briefly titillating party joke we might wish to make of him?  Do we privilege the prurient or the personal?

If you'd like to know the man Kozinski -- and he is well worth knowing -- read about his fear of flying here or the joy of suburban tomato farming here.  Take a journey back to Kozsinki's ancestors' Polish village of Dzurov  to share the grim irony that a "scoundrel" grandfather inadvertently saved the Kozinski clan from the fate of their Jewish neighbors, all of whom now lie in a mass grave just outside of town.  Read Kozinski on writer's block and suicide.  

If you do this, you will no longer be capable of reducing Kozinski to a ribald joke or reveling in his public embarassment.  You will recognize the humanity in him, which is the necessary pre-requisite to recognizing and forgiving the fallible humanity in all of us.     

And litigation?  Here's my unsolicited advice:  Let your clients tell their stories to one another in a joint mediation session.  Neither you nor they will thereafter be capable of reducing the "opposition" to a single demonic character trait. 

I will say it again.  Litigation is not about money.  It is about justice. 

The defense balks at paying Plaintiff at the point of a gun.  The Plaintiff resists releasing the defendant from liability until satisfied that a wrong has been righted or never really existed in the first place.  

You can accomplish justice with money.  But you can accomplish it far more easily, and with far greater satisfaction for your clients, if you allow them to once again share the depth and dimensionality of their dispute with one another; harmonizing their mutual stories of injustice and betrayal.

In the meantime, I suggest we let Kozinski -- and ourselves -- off the hook by recognizing that the sum of the parts is greater -- and in the end far more interesting -- than the temporary public revelation of the smallest part of any man.

Other coverage of note:

Thanks to Anne Reed at Deliberations (this week's ABA Journal featured blog) for pointing us to the Volokh Conspiracy on how Kozinski's Web Site got "outed" in the first place.

If you follow the Volokh links, you'll eventually find Larry Lessig's Web for Dummies Explanation on Why We Shouldn't be Chortling over How Naive Kozinski Is and Why We Should Worry about Spreading This Type of Semi-Purloined Material Around. 

Cyberspace is weird and obscure to many people. So let's translate all this a bit: Imagine the Kozinski's have a den in their house. In the den is a bunch of stuff deposited by anyone in the family -- pictures, books, videos, whatever. And imagine the den has a window, with a lock. But imagine finally the lock is badly installed, so anyone with 30 seconds of jiggling could open the window, climb into the den, and see what the judge keeps in his house. Now imagine finally some disgruntled litigant jiggers the lock, climbs into the window, and starts going through the family's stuff. He finds some stuff that he knows the local puritans won't like. He takes it, and then starts shopping it around to newspapers and the like: "Hey look," he says, "look at the sort of stuff the judge keeps in his house." 

Read the rest of Lessig's great analysis here.

    

Kozinski's Ribald Sense of Humor from the WSJ Law Blog

Susan Estrich's 'take" in her post Good Humor, excerpt below:

If everyone who ever viewed or shared pornography were disqualified from judging the line between protected speech and criminal obscenity, we all would be in trouble. The problem facing Judge Kozinski illustrates what's wrong with the prosecution, not with the judge.

Concurring Opinion's post Judges Gone Wild with this observation dug out of a very lengthy post:

Which brings us to the broader point. Judge Kozinski's actions affect the reputation of the judiciary, on which rest foundations of the state, like public respect for the rule of law. To the extent that this public disclosure undermines public confidence in the judiciary or the rule of law, it's a very bad thing. There's a reason for the outrage that's expressed when the public hears about judges' bad behavior. As Stephen Gillers told the LAT, "The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public."

The National Law Journal's compilation of Expert Opinion on the matter including legal ethics professor Ronald Rotunda's opinion that the material on Kosinzki's site was "demeaning, infantile, pornographic, [and] offensive," which just makes me want to see what type of internet porn the good Professor prefers.

KTLA video report here (from L.A. Times website)

Regulation of Obscenity Web Page with Pertinent Supreme Court Cases on the Issue 

Naked Brunch's article UN-BANNING BOOKS How the courts of the United States came to extend First Amendment guarantees to include pornography by Jack Hafferkamp

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One of the reasons I began this series was to explore the type of professional behavior that tends to trigger professional malpractice litigation -- and how that litigation might be avoided.   

As you may recall, my first post cited a study finding that the top three reasons for filing litigation against a medical provider were:  

so that it would not happen to anyone else . . . 91%

I wanted an explanation . . . 91%

I wanted the doctors to realize what they’d done . . . 90%

In that same study, only 66% of respondents said they'd brought suit because they wanted money.   

Other studies have found that the failure to health care professionals to effectively communicate with patients and their families give rise to more litigation than negligence or bad results in treatment.  As reported in the March/April issue of Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare

ineffective communication with patients and families, rather than quality of care, was the underlying cause of patients' and families' decisions to file suit against their caregivers (Vincent et al., 1994; Hickson et al., 1992). Other researchers found that most patients would be less angry and less likely to sue if physicians honestly and compassionately disclosed medical errors that occurred, admitted responsibility, took steps to reduce the chances of repeat errors in the future, and offered sincere apologies for the suffering that may have resulted because of the bad outcomes (Gallagher et al., 2003). Similarly, research on apologies suggests that individuals receiving a full apology that both expresses sympathy and takes responsibility by the person who wronged them are more likely to accept settlement offers and negotiate towards a resolution rather than going to trial (Robbennolt, 2003). 

See Conflict Management From the Heart:  A Day in the Life of a Medical Ombuds/Mediator by Carole S. Houk, JD, LLM, and Leigh Ana Amerson, BA here.


In Why People Sue Hospitals and Health Care Professionals in Heatlh Industry Online we learn that 40% of respondents answered "yes" to the question whether anything could have been done to prevent litigation after an adverse medical incident.  Those pre-litigation interventions were reported as follows:  

Conflict Associated with End-of-Life Decisions

Someone once told me that a divorce is a hologram of the marriage -- that all of the marital dynamics that have never been resolved -- or even surfaced -- by the divorcing couple -- take shape and form in one way or another in the course of the divorce.  Not surprisingly, the "weapons" of marital dissolution are its most precious assets -- relationship and children -- and its most symbolic -- money. /*

So it is that historic family dynamics (rife with unresolved conflict) will more or less naturally play themselves out around the bed of a loved one who is -- or may  be -- dying.  

How much conflict is there?

One recent study found that conflict associated with decisions about life-sustaining treatment were rife with conflict between medical staff and the families of dying patients.  An abstract of an Conflict associated with decisions to limit life-sustaining treatment in intensive care units reported: 

MAIN RESULTS:  At least 1 health care provider in 78% of the cases described a situation coded as conflict. Conflict occurred between the staff and family members in 48% of the cases, among staff members in 48%, and among family members in 24%. In 63% of the cases, conflict arose over the decision about life-sustaining treatment itself. In 45% of the cases, conflict occurred over other tasks such as communication and pain control. Social issues caused conflict in 19% of the cases.

CONCLUSIONS: Conflict is more prevalent in the setting of intensive care decision making than has previously been demonstrated. While conflict over the treatment decision itself is most common, conflict over other issues, including social issues, is also significant. By identifying conflict and by recognizing that the treatment decision may not be the only conflict present, or even the main one, clinicians may address conflict more constructively.

It's Not About Money But it Will Become About Money if Conflict is Not Treated at the Source

I have much more to say about this but I need to get out to the Valley to see my dad who is -- amazingly (to me at any rate) -- surviving without food or water into Day Nine.

For now, I will simply remind my readers of the following:

• the law monetizes injustice -- people don't
• it's about respect more than it is about money
• the recognition that the individual with whom you are in conflict is acting from moral rather than venal motivations is often the first patch of common ground
• when people focus on money rather than relationship, they universally respond by becoming less generous
• our brains reward us for cooperative behavior, i.e., we're hard-wired for understanding, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation
• even monkeys (our fellow primates) protest if they believe they are being treated unfairly

Why the Coming Crisis and Likelihood of Litigation?

The parents' of the baby-boom are dying.  Extraordinarily high levels of conflict in health care settings are associated with dying.  Hospitals and health care professionals are not yet up to par in resolving conflict at its source.  In the absence of programs to assist the families of the dying negotiate their way through this traumatic experience, people will seek out attorneys; attorneys will, as the law does, monetize pain, suffering, and injustice. 

The research is in.  The solutions are available.

It's up to us.  

______________________________________

*/   Money is symbolic?  Yes it is.  As my longer article on the many meanings people give to money notes:

It is money’s nearly infinite plasticity that makes exchange of unlike things not only possible, but nearly effortless. Unlike barter, which famously requires a “double coincidence of wants,”  money creates a bridge to the future; permits trade at a distance; allows the exchange of durable objects for perishable goods; and, is capable of reducing nearly every human activity into a quantitative monetary value. 

Although contemporary money seems to have shed all of its qualities except its quantity,  “its oneness or fiveness or fiftyness,” we do not in fact use money as if it were fungible. We experience the value of a dollar earned differently from the way we experience one that is stolen or given to us as a gift and we spend it differently as well. 

See The Cost of a Thing is Your Life here

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(right:  Mom and Dad, late '40s)

Dr. X promptly sent me a social worker who was willing and able to answer all of my questions about my father's present condition; the common courses end-stage Parkinson's takes; and, the options available for his care -- aggressive treatment; tube feeding with hydration; palliative care; and, in-home hospice services.

I left the hospital that evening feeling not just better informed but comforted knowing there were people who were educated, trained, skilled, and talented at helping families make the type of decisions we were struggling to make with integrity and compassion.      

"This Man is Nowhere Near Death's Door"

I was awoken from a light and troubled sleep by a telephone call from my step-mother, who was now just as agitated with a physician as I had been the previous afternoon.  

She spoke with urgency. 

"That doctor you fought with," she said, "he sent a neurologist to your father's room at midnight.  Some woman I'd never met before.  I think I might have insulted her." 

"Good for you," I responded, thinking it progress for Juanita to question authority.    

"It's your doing," she said flatly. 

I was uncharacteristically silent.  I couldn't tell if she was expressing gratitude or blame.  

"It's because you yelled at Dr. X.  He wouldn't have sent that woman unless you'd done that."

I still couldn't tell.  It didn't really matter.  We were both doing the best we knew how. 

I asked for the story of the new neurologist as I slid out of bed to avoid waking my husband.  

Juanita was huffy.  "She examined your dad for an hour and then said his medication was completely wrong.  She prescribed him new medication and I don't know what right she has to do that."

"What did she say about his condition?"

I could hear Juanita take control of the conflicting emotions this doctor's diagnosis must have raised in her.        

"That doctor said, 'this man is nowhere near death's door.'"

The Parent Trap -- Hey, Hey, Hey

My parents' divorce in 1961 coincided with Walt Disney's upbeat movie about marital collapse and child custody -- The Parent Trap.  The brilliant Hayley Mills, squared into twins separated in infancy, divided like community property between the beautiful Maureen O'Hara and dashing Brian Keith upon their divorce, and re-united as teens to heroically reignite "their" parents' romance, was as far from my own experience as possible.  Children aren't capable, really, of processing this particular complex set of emotions:  relief that a violent father and physically fragile mother will no longer be scaring the wits out of their children; and, the aching loss a father leaves behind when he believes that divorce means removing from his life everyone associated with his marriage --  including his children.      

In other words, at nine years old, I didn't know whether to be happy or sad; guilty or justified, in response to my Dad's sudden departure.  But the idea of wilfully re-uniting this mismatched pair -- though perhaps some other child's Disney fantasy -- was not my own. 

Nearly forty years later when my father, in his first semi-psychotic episode, left and later divorced his second wife, his second set of children abandoned him.  

By the time my father lay in his hospital bed last week -- either "on the brink of" or "nowhere near" death -- the person with the absolute legal right to decide his fate was his wife of a mere five years duration.  And the only "child" with any interest in stepping forward to help make that decision was me.  

Next:  No Food, No Hydration

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(left:  Dad, middle, after the dust bowl in Julian, California)

I am told that my father is dying.  This is not news.  Dad has a progressive disease that ordinarily results in death only after years of suffering. 

I'm telling you this story (which will be the subject of several posts) because it's been suggested to me that I lodge a complaint with the local community hospital dad was checked into last week.  Or that I sue the doctor who will play a large role in this story.  I'm thus reminded of the type of conflict that causes people to go to the considerable trouble of finding and hiring legal counsel.  The experience I am about to relate considerably deepens my empathy for those people.    

Before I tell this story, I caution my readers not to take the easy way out.  These feelings accompany every kind of conflict -- personal and commercial.   

 

Essential Familial Tremor

Most of us on Dad's side of the family have something called Essential Familial Tremor.  That means our hands shake for reasons the medical community doesn't understand. 

Because denial was and remains my family's primary response to ill health , I was not diagnosed with this condition until I graduated from law school even though I began to suffer its effects at age 14.  When your primary family dis-ease is denial, it's more than a little painfully ironic to have a shared medical condition that quite visibly signals fear.  But we survived the American dust bowl.  We do not complain.  And we do not seek medical treatment.  

EFT and Parkinson's

I digress to EFT and denial because the "benign symptom" of EFT -- shaking -- is the same as one of the early symptoms of the disease Dad is dying from.  Parkinson's. 

For as long as I can remember, Dad's hands shook though my my step-mother (welcome to the family!) vehemently denied it.  "He doesn't shake," she'd snap if we noted dad's inability to get liquid from one container into another without spilling a fair part of it onto the dining table.  

So I can't say when Dad began to show the earliest signs of Parkinson's disease.  I can, however, say when it became undeniable. 

"I Left Your Step-Mother," 

dad is saying into a telephone I've just learned is located on the night-stand next to his bed in a Las Vegas hotel.  "She's sleeping with the gardener," he insists without a trace of skepticism at the fantastic idea that his second wife -- a woman ten years his senior -- has fallen into trampy ways with the "help" at 85 years of age.  "I think my phone is tapped," he continues without interruption.  "I'm going to fly to Sacramento to see my sister Lucille."  

This is the point at which my family is generally willing to first seek medical treatment.  Unmitigated disaster.  

So I sought and was granted (against strenuous opposition, I might somewhat irritably add) a continuance of a trial date that was breathing hot down the back of my neck, boarded a plane for Sacramento and got dad to doctors, psychologists and neurologists. 

Parkinson's is treatable and the dementia abated for a sufficient amount of time to allow dad to pretty cogently divorce his second wife of 35 years and marry the woman who served as his court clerk when he'd been on the bench two decades earlier.

You can't make this stuff up.

This is where we're heading.  Feeding tube and Reasons patients sue their physicians. /* 

So that it would not happen to anyone else	91%
I wanted an explanation	91
I wanted the doctors to realize what they’d done	90
To get an admission of negligence	87
So that the doctor would know how I felt	68
My feelings were ignored	67
I wanted financial compensation	66
Because I was angry	65
So that the doctor did not get away with it	54
So that the doctor would be disciplined	48
Because it was the only way I could cope with my feelings	46
Because of the attitude of the staff afterwards	43
To get back at the doctor involved	23

_______________________

*/  figures represent the percentage of people who agreed with the statement to the left.

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Before giving you today's list of ABA Journal resources that landed in my in-box this morning, I want to announce my appearance on the Journal's dot com front page in its "Ask the Experts" feature. 

If you have a question -- any question -- relating to negotiation strategy and tactics, conflict resolution, mediation advocacy, persuading the opposition that he doesn't fully understand just how $%#*^ his case is, the social psychology of conflict, or the settlement of that pesky piece of litigation that is turning moldy on the upper right hand corner of your desk, just write it into the email box here and your answer will be quickly forthcoming.

Self-promo out of the way, here's the latest on ABAJournal.com resources:

ABAJournal.com has created four new features designed for busy lawyers.

Blawg Search: We've partnered with Justia.com, the leading legal information portal, to create a search engine covering all of the 1,800-plus blogs in our directory -- including yours. It's like Google for lawyers, pinpointing in an instant the most sophisticated and up-to-date commentary by legal professionals on any topic. Use the search box at the top of any of our pages (including our homepage: www.abajournal.com), and on the search results page click on the "Blawg Results" tab. Plus you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any search to follow the results in your feed reader.

News Widget: Now you can add continuously updated ABA Journal headlines to your blog or to personalized pages like iGoogle or Netvibes with our news widget. We're posting 25 to 50 fresh stories every business day, so you're sure to deliver the latest breaking legal news to your readers. Visit our widget page to grab the free code: www.abajournal.com/widgets

Twitter Feed: Are you using Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform? Then you can integrate our headlines into your personal Twitter page. Dozens of lawyers already have. Visit our page and click "Follow": www.twitter.com/abajournal

Facebook Page: If you're a member of Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites, you can become a fan of the ABA Journal. Our Facebook page features our latest headlines, recent covers, and special announcements. Visit our page and click "Become a Fan": http://www.facebook.com/pages/ABA-Journal/13563247155

And to celebrate winning the Webby People's Voice Award in the Law category, we're letting our readers pick which of three acceptance speeches we'll give at the June 10 ceremony. Each is just five words long -- the maximum length the Webby Awards will allow. To cast your vote, visit: http://www.abajournal.com/news/webbyspeechvote/

We hope you find that these features, and more that will be coming in the months ahead, make ABAJournal.com even more useful and informative. We love getting feedback from our readers. If you have suggestions, drop us a line: www.abajournal.com/contact

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Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Antrhopology, authors "Idea Lab" in this morning's Sunday New York Times Magazine, asking How are Humans  Unique?

Absent our collaborative skills, Tomasello tells us, we're not even the smartest animals on the planet.  When comparing adult chimpanzees and orangutans to 2-year-old human children, Tomasello and his colleagues found that apes and toddlers performed equally well on every test other than those measuring social skills -- "social learning, communicating and reading the intentions of others."

We've always known that if you put a human infant on a desert island, he dies.  This does not distinguish us from other social animals who depend upon their family, clan, group or tribe for survival.

What's new is Tomasello's observation that we're the only social animal who shares for the sake of sharing.  "Human infants," he writes

gesture and talk in order to share information with others — they want to be helpful. They also share their emotions and attitudes freely — as when an infant points to a passing bird for its mother and squeals with glee. This unprompted sharing of information and attitudes can be seen as a forerunner of adult gossip, which ensures that members of a group can pool their knowledge and know who is or is not behaving cooperatively. The free sharing of information also creates the possibility of pedagogy — in which adults impart information by telling and showing, and children trust and use this information with confidence. Our nearest primate relatives do not teach and learn in this manner.

That's the good news.  Here's the bad.

[H]umans beings are not cooperating angels; they also put their heads together to do all kinds of heinous deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside “the group.” Recent evolutionary models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and charge that “they” threaten “us.” The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today.

This evolutionary biologist is not content, however, to simply describe primate (that's us) behavior.  He also hopes to improve it. 

Tomasello's elegant solution to a seeminly intractable problem?  

Find new ways to define the group.

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Negotiated Resolutions in Community Mediation

Nearly every condominium complex harbors an outlaw -- the man, woman, couple or family who refuse to follow the rules.  The young couple who blasts the woofers off their stereo system at 3 a.m.  The elderly woman who doesn't clean up after her dog.  The raucous family that plays "Marco Polo" in the community pool after midnight.  

Offended and outraged, other homeowners make demands on their volunteer board who contact the (often unresponsive) management company.  The HOA board does its best.  It issues warnings to procure compliance.  To no avail.  Eventually, someone reads the CC&R's.  They learn that the Board has enforceable legal duties and the homeoweners actionable legal rights. 

Many of these disputes make their way to the Los Angeles County Bar Association's Dispute Resolution Center in West Hollywood.  And some of them make their way to me. 

Welcome to community mediation -- the non-zero sum, value-based, rights-seeking, joint session transformative dispute resolution process.  We're well trained and we're free.

But can we deliver justice?

 

Attorneys, the Law, Mediation and Justice 

Maybe it was just my G-g-g-generation, but I went to law school primarily because I was interested in the delivery of justice.  Although my primary involvement in the 20th Century 's civil rights movements was as a Vista volunteer at an activist women's center in San Diego in the early 1970's, I wasn't simply pursuing my own narrow self-interests when I applied to law school.   

As early as I can recall -- long before I'd conclude that 1950's and '60s women were oppressed -- I'd already developed a deep longing for the reconstruction of adult relationships along the lines of fairness.  This must be a typical childhood longing premised upon our predicament of being physically small and powerless.  An "unjust" world that rewards only power would not ensure our survival while a world in which everyone is valued and treated fairly would.     

Couple a child's sense of justice with televised images of "the law" aiming fire-hoses at peacefully demonstrating "Negroes" and you get a life-long commitment not simply to the "rule of law" but to the necessity for that "rule" to be premised upon justice.   

Are Negotiated and Mediated Resolutions Trumping Justice?   

These are just a few of the reasons it troubles me so when scholars suggest that mediated and negotiated resolutions to litigated disputes are unjust.  See yesterday's post here and the article that prompted it, Justice Trumps Peace (etc.) here.  If mediation is truly what its critics contend it to be -- a full-frontal assault upon the rights gained by marginalized citizens during the Civil Rights era -- I'm in serious moral trouble here. 

Consider this contention in Justice Trumps Peace: 

“ADR rhetoric” reinforce[s] a conservative challenge to “the law and reform discourse of the 1960s, a discourse concerned with justice and root causes, and with debates over right and wrong.” “The rights theme, consistent throughout earlier debates over legal resources,” was conspicuous by its absence in “the policy discussion on alternative dispute resolution.” . . . . 

Laura Nader . . . not[ed] that ADR’s “process of communication” ethos took necessary rough, ideological edges off claims, and fostered what she called “coercive harmony.” Nader argued that ADR was permeated with “conformist ideology,” which was employed to “suppress the realities of class, gender, and racial antagonism” endemic to American society, and as such, it comprised an “unreal law movement.” Nader contended that ADR’s emphasis on conciliation meant that critical considerations of “blame or rights” were “avoided and replaced by the rhetoric of compromise and relationship.” She concluded that “cultural notions of justice are factored out.” 

This tendency to screen-out unpleasant, divisive, but nonetheless vital social concerns supports Fiss’s characterization of ADR as a “sociologically impoverished universe,” in which critical issues of class, race and gender are subsumed to construct “a world composed exclusively of individuals.”

Can Justice be Negotiated?

Cheyney Ryan, a philosophy professor at the University of Oregon, contributed a short piece to the must-have Negotiator's Fieldbook entitled Rawls on Negotiating Justice.  John Rawls, Ryan explains, is the seminal philosopher of justice in the 20th century.  "From the start," writes Ryan,

Rawls asked us to think of justice as  a matter of agreement.  He suggested that we think of the principles guiding a just society as the ones that individuals would agree to -- with the crucial proviso that they do not know where they themselves would end up in society, on the top or the bottom.  They would thus act from behind a "veil of ignorance . . . Given this constraint, no individual could tailor the principles of justice to his or her special talents or circumstances, which is why Rawls called this approach "justice as fairness."  Rawls suggested that the principles that would be agreed to would be ones that were deeply committed ot basic human rights and had a strong presumption in favor of economic equality.  Inequalities would only be tolerated if they most greatly benefited the least well off.

According to Ryan, Rawls concluded in his later writings that the reciprocity inherent in bargained-for resolutions and negotiation's search for mutual advantage were insufficient to ensure justice.  Rawls therefore shifted the basis of his theory from the search for rational resolutions to the implementation of reasonable ones.  "The question to ask of principles of justice," posited Rawls, was,

what were the most reasonable ones for people to agree to given the nature of our society and the nature of who we are?  Justice, thus reconceived, lost the harsh individualism that Rawls' earlier theory seemed to possess.  The stress on reasonableness meant that people taking others into account was an essential part of what justice was all about.  His theory also moved away from his earlier hyper-abstraction, insofar as we talk of what is "reasonable" invariably refers not to some hypotheitcal persons with hypotheical aims but to real people -- in this case, us, here and now.

Negotiating Justice in Community Mediation 

Condominium owners John and Betty Jones (not their real names) were being driven to distraction by their neighbors who arrived home at 2 a.m. only to commence what felt like a Pekinese rodeo in their upstairs apartment.  The indominable Kathryn Turk who convenes mediations for LACBA's Dispute Resolution Services in West Hollywood managed to procure the attendance of an HOA Board member with full authority to "settle" the case.  Unfortunately, the "outlaw" homeowner refused to attend.

John Jones had practically memorized the CC&R's governing the Board's duties and the homeowner's rights.  His wife repeatedly broke into tears as she described sleepless nights spent on the living room couch where the upstairs neighbor's early morning antics were the least disturbing.  The volunteer Board member was sympathetic but at a loss for solutions.  She'd contacted "management" and sent warnings to the miscreants, all to no avail. 

Only punitive measures would do at this point, said Jones. The CC&R's called for sanctions to be imposed on rule-breakers but lacked a means of implementation and enforcement.  The HOA representative indicated that she not only had the Board's authority to settle the matter, but to impose any necessary and reasonable rules to flesh out the CC&R's inadequate policies.

"We want monetary sanctions imposed," Jones was saying, "sanctions that can be made liens against the property just as HOA dues can be." 

"What about notice?"  I asked.  "And  a hearing?  There's nothing in the rules about the procedure for imposing sanctions."

"24 hours!" shouted John.  "If they don't comply, a $500 sanction to be made a lien against their property.  And another $500 for every day they continue to violate the noise restrictions contained in the CCR's."

Not knowing about Rawls' veil-of-ignorance-just-rule-making principle, I nevertheless wondered aloud whether Mr. and Mrs. Jones understood that the bylaws they were suggesting could be used by their scofflaw neighbors as easily as they could be pursued by the Jones.  

"Oh."

Silence.

"What set of rules do you think would be fair?" I asked.

Two hours later, we had achieved what my Con Law professor would have called "procedural due process" -- a set of rules that would likely pass Constitutional muster that came from the parties -- not from the mediator.

Whether justice and fairness are, at some level, hard-wired into us (see Brain reacts to fairness as it does to money and chocolate) or culturally controlled, it seems that Rawls' conception of "justice and fairness" based upon reasonableness and enlightened self-interest might flow more or less naturally from a mediated dispute resolution forum where the parties, rather than the mediator, are in control.

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The New York Times reports this morning that there were 243,353 foreclosure filings in April alone, nearly three times the total in the same month just two years ago," making it all but inevitable that  "many millions of American families will be losing their homes before long."

In The Scars of Losing a Home, Times writer Robert A. Shiller reports that following a brief moment of sympathy for such unfortunates, we will almost instinctively turn the full force of our judgment upon them.    

[I]nstead of having sympathy for these homeowners, many people blame them for their predicaments. That isn’t surprising. It’s an example of a general tendency that was documented by social psychologists decades ago.

In his 1980 book, “The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion,” Melvin Lerner, a social psychologist, argued that people want to believe in the inherent justice of the economic system in which they live, and want to believe that people who appear to be suffering are in fact responsible for their own situations.

He provided empirical evidence, derived from experiments, that after an initial pang of sympathy, people tend to develop negative views toward others who are suffering. That negative tendency seems to be at work today.

Losing "Everything" -- How Bad is It?

When the Northridge earthquake threw me out of bed in the early morning hours of January 17, 1994, my financial life was sliding out of control.  By May, I'd be laid off from my job as an associate attorney in a prominent Los Angeles law firm and by July I'd be signing bankruptcy papers.  Foreclosure would follow.

More pertinent to the morning of the earthquake is the fact that neither my downstairs neighbor --the HOA's President -- nor many of the other owners in my 50-unit condominium complex were speaking to me.  Not only was I failing to pay my HOA dues in a timely fashion, I had the scent of failure about me. 

Neighbors in Los Angeles tend to come together only following natural disasters.  Fire, flood, earthquake, O.J.  These were the seasons of the year in which the the federal government erased my indebtedness; the bank foreclosed on my home; and, I was thrown up on consumerism's shores without any credit cards.   

On the morning of the earthquake, the shame associated with my financial distress kept  me from joining my neighbors on the sidewalk as aftershocks continued to wrench the foundations of our building.  Instead, I opened the French doors to my small balcony, pulled the  pillow and blanket from my bed and laid down on the living room floor in order to take comfort from the small talk rising up from the street below.

By June, foreclosure papers would be posted on my front door and  I would be living in the "studio" apartment good friends created for me out of the chaos of a spacious but unused basement in their small Echo Park house.  As L.A. began the slow re-construction of its streets, apartment buildings and houses, as fallen chimneys were rebuilt and freeways restored, I too would begin a recovery of my own, not only materially, but spiritually as well.    

It's All right, It's All Right, We Can't Be Forever Blessed/ **

Another story in today's Times recounts the shame white collar workers experience in their hot-house communities when they are laid off from high paying jobs.  In The Language of Loss for the Jobless  we learn that failure leaves our friends speechless and ourselves ashamed.  "Victim-blaming," writes Hoffman, 

dates to Job’s mourners. “It helps people who are still employed to believe that people who have been laid off did something wrong,” Ms. Baber said. “If you can blame them, then you can feel protected. If it’s just random — ‘they moved customer service to Dallas’ — then nothing will protect you either, and that’s scary to people.” 

Though we may not know what to say, most of us know what to do.  As the wife of one laid off executive recounts -- “Friends have kept us alive. . . and given us clothes for our kids.  One friend just found a job for my husband.” 

  Material Losses and Spiritual Gains

Our culture suffers from the burden of success.  Not only does failure tend to cause us shame, many see the inevitable losses that necessarily punctuate even the most "successful" careers as moral failings.  And let's not be coy -- often bad decisions and poor judgment cause successes that are precariously balanced and relationships that are already strained to "suddenly" collapse.    

Because we tend only to share our stories of success and not our failures, we hardly know what to do when misfortune knocks on our door.  That's why today's Times "recession" stories made me want to share my own tale of loss.  Because we too often feel as if we can only share the "success" bits of our personal family narratives. 

Here's the good news for those facing bankruptcy and foreclosure:  if you are able to find a community of people who are also recovering from life's inevitable reverses, you will eventually find that success -- with its attendant pretense of imperviousness to disaster -- is actually more alienating than its opposite.  I consider myself more than lucky to have found such a community.  One that taught me how much more important it is for me to be of service to my fellows than to reach some perceived pinnacle of success.  One that taught me that it is better to be a worker among workers than it is to be "best in show"  One that taught me that my fortune lies in neighborliness and my wealth in the quality of my relationship with my fellows.  One that taught me, finally, that it is better to weather flood, fire, earthquake, riot, and recession in a community in which I am simply one of its fallible members than it is to huddle under a blanket holding onto my fragile self-esteem while yearning to join the company of my  neighbors on the street below.  

(see criticism of Shiller's commentary, in The Mess That Greenspan made here -- The Mess is another Forbes Business and Financial Network Blog that I've enjoyed reading)

_________________

**/  Taken from Paul Simon's American Tune, 

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hour
and sing an American tune
But it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest 
 

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Take a look at this summary of the article When Winning Is Everything by Deepak Malhotra, Gillian Ku, and J. Keith Murnighan, now available online here as well as in the May '08 Harvard Business Review.

Malhotra and colleagues suggest that an adrenaline-fueled emotional state [which they] call  competitive arousal, often leads to bad decisions.

Negotiating litigators may want to note that all of the conditions giving rise to "competitive arousal" are the day-to-day conditions in which litigation is conducted, i.e., intense rivalry, especially in the form of one-on-one competitions; time pressure . . . ; and being in the spotlight—that is, working in the presence of an audience.

Sound familiar?  Take a look at the consequences and the potential solutions below. 

Individually, these factors can seriously impair managerial decision making; together, their consequences can be dire, as evidenced by many high-profile business disasters. It's not possible to avoid destructive competitions and bidding wars completely.

But managers can help prevent competitive arousal by anticipating potentially harmful competitive dynamics and then restructuring the deal-making process. They can also stop irrational competitive behavior from escalating by addressing the causes of competitive arousal.

When rivalry is intense, for instance, managers can

• limit the roles of those who feel it most
• reduce time pressure by extending or eliminating arbitrary deadlines
• deflect the spotlight by spreading the responsibility for critical competitive decisions among team members.

Decision makers will be most successful when they focus on winning contests in which they have a real advantage—and take a step back from those in which winning exacts too high a cost.

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Recently, I excerpted the expressed concerns of in-house counsel about ineffective mediators.   Among the complaints was some mediators' refusal to see or acknowledge the other side's "irrationality" As Where's the Magic from the U.K. online Mediator Magazine noted:

It can be frustrating where they [the mediator] can see the irrationality of the other party, how their claims and positions are unsubstantiated, and choose to ignore it,' says Frank Aghovia, legal adviser at Exel Plc. He continues, 'It's like saying, "I know he's talking out of his backside, but can you give him what he wants anyway." He concludes that 'steadfast neutrality is irritating and wastes time.'

Reality-Testing

Helping litigants and their attorneys reassess their case is one of the mediator's greatest challenges.  The mediator intervenes only after the parties' dispute has reached stalemate.  Each party to a stalemate has negative attitudes about his adversary that are maintained and prolonged by three psychological mechanisms: selective perception, self-fulfilling prophecy, and autistic hostility.

Selective perception:  people tend to select those perceptions that tend to confirm their existing attitudes, and ignore or discount information that would disconfirm their existing attitudes.

Self-fulfilling prophecies:  people with negative attitudes about their adversary engage in conduct that provokes the adversary's "expected" response, which confirms the party's original expectation, and a vicious cycle ensues.

Autistic hostility:  Parties in litigation have stopped talking with one another about their dispute, communicating only through their attorneys.  The social scientists would say that such people are "stuck in autistic hostility, that is, their hostility is perpetuated by their refusal to communicate."

(for a full discussion of these and other conflict dynamics see CR Info's Book Summary of Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate and Settlement by Dean G. Pruitt and Jeffrey Z. Rubin). 

When the parties are in this frame of mind -- particularly after years of highly contentious litigation -- they genuinely believe that the other side is either completely irrational or downright evil.

So how does the mediator reality test in this climate of anger and distrust while continuing to maintain his ability to work effectively with both parties.  

Peter Robinson, co-director of the prestigious Straus Institute of Conflict Resolution in Malibu, California, tackles this problem by way of a hypothetical.  He assumes that one side believes his adversary came here from another planet via UFO.  What should a mediator -- who needs to retain the trust and confidence of both sides -- do?  

Robinson answers his own rhetorical question in this fashion:

When talking to the UFO-guy, I am totally with him.  Listening, asking questions, trying to understand whether his delusion actually has some hidden meaning that might suggest a way to resolve the dispute without asking the other party to "buy in" to the UFO story.

After giving Mr. UFO an opportunity to have his say and to experience -- perhaps for the first time ever -- another human being's willingness to temporarily suspend his disbelief -- I begin to gently "reality test."  To do so, I do not have to doubt Mr. UFO's story.  I can suggest, however, that not everyone is as understanding as I am. 

"Have you told this story to many people?" I might ask.  "And what has their response been?"  Do you have any reason to believe that a judge or jury might be more likely to believe this narrative of events more than, say, your mother, sister, cousin, wife, best friend, etc. were?

Robinson's suggested action between the rock of understanding and the hard place of consensual reality is shrewd and effective.  It neatly avoids the problem recently raised by my friend and colleague Jeff Kichaven who has likened piling rationales atop one another for the purpose of changing another's mind to raising your voice for the purpose of communicating with a deaf man.   

Harvard Business School professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman address the irrationality problem in another fashion in their tremendously useful book Negotiation Genius. 

"Whenever our students or clients tell us about their 'irrational' or 'crazy' counterparts," they write, "we work with them to carefully consider whether the other side is truly irrational.  Almost always, the answer is no."

Malhotra and Bazerman list the mistakes that lead us to call our negotiating partners "nuts," "delusional" or "evil" as follows:

Mistake No. 1:  They are Not Delusional, They are Uninformed. 

If you can educate or inform your bargaining partner, say Malhotra and Bazerman

about their true interests, the consequences of their actions, the strength of your BATNA, and so on - there is a strong likelihood they will make better decisions . . . [I]f someone says "no" to an offer that you know is in her best interest, do not assume she is irrational.  Instead, work to ensure that she understands why the offer is in her best interest.  She may simply have misunderstood or ignored a crucial piece of information.

Mistake No. 2:  They are Not Irrational; They Have Hidden Constraints

In negotiation, a wide variety of possible constraints exist.  The other side may be constrained by advice from her lawyers, by the fear of setting a dangerous precedent, by promises she has made to other parties [this is a particularly common constraint in IP infringement actions] by time pressure and so on.  [D]iscover these constraints . . . and . . help other parties overcome them . . . rather than dismissing others as irrational.

Mistake No. 3:  They are Not Irrational; They Have Hidden Interests

[P]eople will sometimes reject your offer because they think it is unfair, because they don't like you [or are tired of feeling as if you don't like them] or for other reasons that have nothing to do with the obvious merits of your proposal.  These people are not irrational; they are simply fulfilling needs and interests that you may not fully appreciate.  .  .  [I]nvestigate:  "What might be motivating her to act this way?  What are all of her interests?"

But What if They Really Are Irrational

If your counterpart truly is irrational -- in other words, he is determined to work against what is in his best interest -- then your options will be fewer.  You can try to push through an agreement despite his irrationality, you can try to "go around him" by negotiating with someone else with authority who seems more willing to listen to reasons . . . or you may decide to pursue your BATNA because his irrationality has eliminated all hope of creating value.

I have a friend who is, literally,  a rocket scientist.  He says that there are no problems which cannot be solved -- only problems that we don't yet understand.  This is as true in negotiation as it is in rocket science.  In both cases, the wisest course is to assume you know nothing and begin asking the type of questions that would help learn something.

 

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Today's New York Times (Questions of Rent Tactics by Private Equity) reports that investment firms have been purchasing New York City rental properties for the avowed purpose of "turning over 20 percent to 30 percent of the units, five times the typical vacancy rate," to upgrade the rentals up and out of rent regulation, generating tens of millions of dollars of income for the investors.    

Tenants are complaining that the investment firms' tactics to "turn over" those units (i.e., evict low-income residents from their homes) are not only ruthless, but fraudulent as well.  See the full article here.

So what's the little guy to do when BigBusiness decides to set aside ethics to maximize profit?  What individuals have always done when their survival is threatened.  Organize.  According to John Medina, author of Brain Rules, there's more than one way to be the fittest survivor and collaboration has always been our species' strategy.  

"Suppose you are not the biggest person on the block," Medina writes,

but you have thousands of years to become one.  What do you do?  If you are an animal, the most straightforward approach is becoming physically bigger, like the alpha male in a dog pack, with selection favoring muscle and bone.  But there is another way to double your biomass.  It's not by creating a body, but by creating an ally.  If you could establish cooperative agreements with some of your neighbors, you could double your power even if you did not personally double your strength. 

Trying to fight off a woolly mammoth?  Alone, and the fight might look like Bambi vs. Godzilla.  Two or three of you, however, coordinating your behaviors and establishing the concept of 'teamwork,' and you present a formidable challenge:  You can figure out how to compel the mammoth to tumble over a cliff.  There is ample evidence that his is exactly what we did

Locating and deploying likely allies is not only good sense when the individual has no bargaining power -- like NYC's low-income tenants -- it's also an extremely savvy move for business negotiators.  As Lax and Sebenius explain in their ground-breaking book 3-D Negotiation

[w]here one-dimensional negotiators mainly focus on actions at the table, [the] third dimension, “setup,” extends to actions away from the table that shape and re-shape the situation to advantage. In deal after deal we’ve seen the same result: once the parties and issues are fixed, and once the negotiating table has otherwise been set, much of the game has already been played.

Therefore, before even showing up at the conference room, 3-D Negotiators take the initiative. They act away from the table to set up the most promising possible situation, ready for tactical interplay. This means ensuring that the right parties have been approached, in the right sequence, to deal with the right issues, that engage the right set of interests, at the right table or tables, at the right time, under the right expectations, and facing the right consequences of walking away if there is no deal.

If the setup at the table isn’t promising, this calls for moves to re-set it more favorably. As we’ll show you, a superior setup plus the right tactics can yield remarkable results that would be unattainable by purely tactical means, however skillful.

See the 3-D Negotiation strategy summarized in the online introduction here.

You don't need to grow larger, richer, stronger or even smarter to gain a bargaining advantage.  If you find the right allies, before you know it, you'll be roasting that woolly mammoth over charcoal briquettes in your own backyard.   

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I'm asked this morning by an ADR colleague whether we can criticize diversity without sounding like racists.  The question itself is problematic because it not only assumes a racial divide, it places "us" on the "white" side of it. 

The question arose from a recent press release by local mediator Elizabeth Moreno -- Is Mediation Losing Its Effectiveness:  Lack of Diverse Mediators.  The release describes an ADR diversity initiative being pursued by Shell Oil.  Shell, noted Moreno, is  

 introducing supplier diversity to the ADR profession [by] extend[ing] business opportunities to certified minority and women ADR neutrals. These efforts, coined as "second tier," allow Shell to influence prime or majority ADR firms, with whom they do business, to also contract with minority and women owned ADR firms within the business community.

In the upcoming months Shell will be targeting  . . . ADR services to participate in second tier efforts. Shell astutely recognizes that by embracing the concept of inclusion, the company will rise to a higher level, reflecting its belief that it "will benefit from diversity through better relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, employees, government and other stakeholders, with positive impact on the bottom line."

I'm assuming that my questioner does not agree with the "affirmative action" aspect of this program.  Having debated the affirmative action issue since I began law school at U.C. Davis where the Supreme Court Bakke decision originated, I know well how divisive this issue can be.  But it is an important issue -- an issue critical to a nation not only "conceived in liberty" but "dedicated to the proposition that all men (sic) are created equal."

So Let's Take a Look at ADR and Diversity

I'll ask the academics over at the ADR Prof Blog to correct me if I'm wrong.  

I understand the academic criticism of mediation to be this:  in the immediate post-civil rights era while greater legal protections have been afforded to women and under-represented minorities, the "people" have been channeled into a system -- mediation -- that lacks the prejudice-flattening constraints of the rule of law.  More disturbing, say critics, is the fact that this "lawless" system is largely presided over by -- excuse me if this offends anyone -- OLD WHITE MEN.

I've learned more about racial bias talking to my liberal (white) "unprejudiced" friends this election season than I have since I participated in the "second wave" women's movement in the early nineteen seventies (remember consciousness raising?)  I do not judge them, nor myself, for our necessarily limited view which just happens to be that of the dominant culture.

I know we still have a serious racial divide because when I talk to my educated and liberal African American friends they say things that shock me. Things like -- the U.S. may have started the AIDS epidemic to rid the world of Africans. OK. I get it.  There's something about their experience of America that is so radically different from mine that I think their point of view is, frankly, just a little nuts.  This is what I do know -- I will never truly be able to see the world from their point of view.

That said, I do think we can criticize people for taking advantage of "diversity" issues to forward an agenda -- or their own personal advancement -- other than forwarding diversity itself. We can criticize those who would deepen the divide to profit from it.

I think Obama is modeling the correct response to racial divide, which is one of the reasons his candidacy impresses me so.  There haven't been many public figures willing to talk about the elephant in America's living room -- racism.  Nor has anyone on the national stage in my memory ever said "your dreams do not have to come at the expense of mine."

If I could write a sentence in a circle at this point, instead of linearly as the language requires me to do, I would do so.  Here is what I understood Obama's response to the question of the racial divide in America to be.

Acknowledge it Heal it Move on Heal it Move on Acknowledge it Move On Heal it Acknowledge it

There are no periods in this sentence because this activity needs to be constant and on-going.  Because we will always be stuck in our own point of view.  Because in-group and out-group prejudice will always be with us. And because the more visible markers there are for "otherness" in others, the more prey we are to the error of dividing the world into "us" and 'them."  

The answer?  Diversity.  Vigilance.  Education. 

Toward that end, here are some ADR Diversity resources: 

Commonality to Balance Diversity

Mediation:  the Great Equalizer?  A Critical Theory Analysis

Toward a More Perfect Union in an Age of Diversity: A Guide to Building Stronger Communities
through Public Dialogue

Center for Dispute Resolution, whose mission is to "to promote and provide education and comprehensive approaches to dispute resolution that constructively serve the needs of our culturally diverse society."   

ACCESS ADR:  A 2004 Diversity Initiative Launched With The Support Of The JAMS Foundation And The ABA

Striving for DIVERSITY in ADR & Why it Matters: An Interview with the Hon. Timothy K. Lewis, the Chairman of the AAA's Diversity Committee [who] speaks candidly about his interest in diversity in the decision making professions, and why allowing minorities and women an opportunity to participate is so vitally important.

The Diversity Task force of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution ("CPR") whose mission it is to "adopt businessdriven initiatives to increase the ethnic, gender, and social diversity of mediators, arbitrators, and those involved in alternative dispute resolution, both within CPR institute and on a national scale."

Compilation of mediate dot com articles on diversity in mediation 

THE GREGORY SOBEL DIVERSITY IN MEDIATION SCHOLARSHIP APPLICATION

Slouching Towards Inclusion by Carol Miller Lieber & Jamala Rogers

Diversity Resistance

The Media Diversity Institute

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A friend and former legal partner was fond of saying that the biggest lie in the business was I don't take it personally. After four years of full-time mediation, I have another "Big Lie" to add – it’s only about money.

The social scientists who sutdy these things say that the way in which we respond to adversity "often reflects the fact that [our] prestige or status has been threatened more than the fact that [our] purchasing power has been diminished." Miller, Disrespect and the Experience of Injustice, Annual Review of Psychology (2002). In other words, the corporate C.E.O., like any other kid on the block, will retaliate when he feels he has been disrespected.

Conversely, research shows that business people are reluctant to recommend legal action if they believe that they and their company have been treated respectfully. Although this is particularly true of fiduciary and special relationships such as lawyer-client and business partnerships of all kinds, it also applies to arm's length business transactions.

Every commercial interaction, we are told, "represents a social exchange and every form of social behavior represents a resource." Id. People's satisfaction with the outcome of a commercial transaction therefore "depends highly, and often primarily, on their perception of the fairness of those outcomes." Id.

When we, as litigators and counsellors, actively listen to what our clients and our adversaries are saying about the rights and responsibilities of all participants in an ethical business community, we stand the best chance of engendering mutual trust and respect among the parties. In that atmosphere, the probability of becoming embroiled in litigation decreases precipitously. When the parties believe that their concerns are being heard and respected, losses that might otherwise become lawsuits, are far more likely to be addressed as the understandable consequence of the inevitable mistakes and miscommunications that attend all human enterprises.

As much as we'd like to believe that we don't take it personally or that it's only about money, the good news for all of us is that we do and it's not.

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I'll add these to my blog roll when I'm not rushing out the door.  For now, check out Jonathan Farrington's Blog post on Negotiation - Dealing with the Early Phases, a resource I have to thank the Business Growth Blog for, cited at the end of more excellent advice on Negotiating:  Thinking it through. 

Here's a teaser to get you to the Business Growth post:

Remember that classic scene in "Erin Brokovich" where the high powered, electric utility law team shows up in force to negotiate with the small town law firm? Ed Masry sees them coming in and gets all his staff to file into the board room so they have more "lawyers" on their side of the table… and overpowers the power brokers.

Would you like to have a system that helps you think on your feet like that?

Here is a list of 8 questions you can ask yourself when you suddenly realize that you have to prepare for a negotiation. Use these to generate quick preparation for any negotiation.

For the list of 8, click here!

Thanks guys!  Great advice in both posts with more good negotiation resources at the end of the Business Growth Blog post.

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In the new issue of The Complete Lawyer, my fellow Human Factor columnists and I talk about what new tricks we had to learn and old skills we had to re-invent when we took the journey from legal to mediation practice.  I give you my section of the column below, encouraging you to link to the Human Factor here to read what my my good friends and colleagues Gini Nelson, Stephanie West Allen and Diane Levin have to say.

My first day of mediation training progressed in somewhat the same fashion as my first few weeks in Civil Procedure. I remember struggling with the theoretical bases of jurisdiction in Pennoyer v. Neff one day only to be told the following week that Pennoyer was no longer the law. “Why,” I remember thinking, “did we even bother with Pennoyer when this Buckeye case about an exploding boiler now seems to be the law? Or would it be replaced next week as well?”

Law school, which taught me to “think like a lawyer,” was the precise opposite of my new mediation studies. Now, it seemed, I was being trained to stop “thinking like a lawyer.” Still, mediation, like the law, was full of conflicting ideologies from which it appeared I was required to choose.

It was easy for me to be evaluative: I had 25 years of legal practice in my backpack. I learned Dr. Cialdini’s “Principles of Ethical Influence”—Reciprocation, Scarcity (the rule of the rare), Authority, Commitment, Empathy, and, Consensus. These power principles helped the mediator to “make the other side see reason” when called upon to do so.

But the evaluative style was not the only prescribed route to mediation mastery. There were many who favored facilitation. The facilitative mediator first creates an atmosphere of hope and safety before helping the parties locate areas of agreement and mutual benefit. Here, the mediator is a follower or helper on the path to resolution, like the protective figures who appear early in a hero’s journey to enlightenment.

You can’t immerse yourself in mediation for long before you hear the clamor of the transformative crowd. Facilitative mediators, say the transformative folks, too often present themselves as wizards who intrude upon the parties’ conflict with their own agenda—usually “resolution be damned, let’s settle this darn thing!” The transformative mediator lets the session wheel out of control if that is where it is eager to go. Conflict is not seen as a state to be avoided or suppressed. Like a loving mother following the course of her child’s flu, the transformative mediator provides the parties with encouragement, opportunities to rest, lots of fluids and a metaphoric place to lay their heads as the conflict runs its natural course.

When I first brought this tangle of methodologies to the few master mediators I know, they all made short work of it with the scalpel of experience. “You are the technique,” they instructed. “Just stay in the process. Don’t guess. Ask questions. Listen. Don’t give up before the miracle of mediation happens.”

Now, four years into a full-time ADR practice, I am still struggling to embrace the entire dispute—the business or people problem that found its way to an attorney because of the justice issues with which it was burdened. I often feel that I’m walking a razor’s edge. I will never stop “thinking like a lawyer.” Nor will I stop pursuing this new way of thinking—one that looks for the opportunity to finesse the legal impasse by using the problem itself as an opportunity to broker a deal.

Why mediation? For me, it’s simply a broader canvass on which to paint a new picture. How mediation? In baby steps, one after the other, in just the same way I learned to be a litigator and trial attorney. How can the Human Factor help with your own life and legal practice? Stick around. Miracles are common here. We think you’ll enjoy the ride.

 

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The Los Angeles County Bar Association will soon be bringing its members the dynamite on-line work-life balance journal The Complete Lawyer.

Even if I weren't a columnist for TCL (the Human Factor here) I'd still urge you to flip through the online "pages" of this tremendous resource.  Take a look at the following for instance.

Are You As Stressed As Other Attorneys? by Ellen Moran, Lyle Miller and Alma Dell Smith 

We’re Culturally Inclined To Separate Mind And Body by Richard Strozzi-Heckler

My own husband's favorite offering -- When You Lose Sleep, Your Work And Health Suffer Dramatically by Thomas M. Heffron ("yes, honey, I'm coming to bed!")

Possibly A Firm’s Most Effective Health Insurance by one of my co-columnists, Stephanie West Allen who has penned this article with her Brains on Purpose colleague Jeffrey Schwartz

How To Master Stress by Maynard Brusman

Ask The Coaches (about networking) by Debby Stone and Laura Biering

Fix The Leaks In The Pipeline (on minority law school enrollment) by Carl Cooper

Hourly Billing Is The Opiate Of The Profession by Ronald J. Baker

Invest In Training Programs During Tough Economic Times  by Kathleen Brady

Five Steps To Achieve A Sound Mind by Cathy Wright

Master The Fine Art Of Appreciation by Judi Craig 

Do You Think Like A Solo Practitioner?  by Susan Cartier Liebel

Women Lawyers Have Natural Allies In The Millennial Generation by Lauren Stiller Rikleen 

What’s On Your Mind? by Arnie Herz

Beware Of Bloglash by Dawn Wagenaar

. . . . and much much more,

 

including my reviews of Lauren Stiller Rikleen's brilliant Ending the Gauntlet:  Removing Barriers to Women's Success in the Law

and

Ken Cloke's challenging new book Conflict Revolution:  Mediating Evil, War, Injustice and Terrorism.

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Canadian Lawyer Michael Webster asks about Jay Welsh's comment (see videos) that "in a mediation the plaintiff has to settle for far less than they thought and the the defendant has to pay far more than they ever thought." 

"So," asks Webster, "this would be the lose/lose theory of mediation?"

I know when Michael's being sarcastic but decided to respond seriously by noting that Jay himself  used the phrase "lose-lose." 

I went on to say that the most valuable service I can often perform is to "break through confirmation and other biases/ ** that have interfered with case analysis and caused impasse."

Michael's reply was important:  

When the issues have been crystallized into legal ones so well, you are in a lose/lose situation. The manager's dilemma then becomes counsel's dilemma: how do I manage to convince my client to lose more than I ever predicted and still maintain my own credibility.

Though I'm a little tempted to be flip ("this is why they pay me the big bucks") Michael's question nails one of the most difficult issue attorneys must deal with in settlement negotiations.  It is certainly one of the most delicate tasks a mediator is called upon to perform.

First Let's Re-Visit Interest-Based vs. Distributive Settlement Negotiations, Asking Ourselves Whether There's Really Such a Thing as a "Pure" Money Case

My husband, with 35-years of complex commercial litigation practice under his belt is my attorney-mediator-communication weather-vane.  So I asked him over pancakes this morning, "Honey, do you think there's any such thing as a 'pure' money case?"

Two months ago, he would have said "yes," and given me that "you've changed too much" look.  I don't know why he said "no" this morning.  But here was the gist of his response.

"Every case involves someone's interests, whether it's the GC or a company executive, or even a 'little guy' down the management chain who made a decision that impacted the course of the dispute four or five years ago.  So of course there are innumerable non-monetary concerns that impact why the case is settled and when and for how much.  Then again, maybe I've just been living with you for too long."

So let me first say that there is no such thing as a non-interest based negotiation.  There are only negotiations in which we ignore the fact that party interests are at play.  

This is one of those nature/nurture mind/body duality questions.  Yes, it's "just" about money.  And yes, the money represents party interests.  It's nature and nurture, mind and body, budgetary constraints and party goals and relationships.

Here's another thing.  Although the disputing parties may never again be in relationship with one another, the people on each side of the conflict-fence are not only in daily contact, their well-being, livelihoods, self-respect, reputation, promotions, demotions, and salaries depend upon their on-going relationships with one another, which are all in play in every negotiation of every commercial dispute.

And one more thing.  Conflict cannot arise in the absence of a relationship.  Even though the disputing parties may never again be in relationship, they're sure the heck in relationship now.   And the relationship of the disputing parties from the moment conflict arises to the minute it settles has everything to do with its resolution.

There is no "zero-sum" game outside the realm of the virtual or the hypothetical.  There is no "rational" man.  People -- messy, conflicted, emotion- and interest-driven people -- are the necessary pre-requisite to conflict.  How we deal with apparent lose-lose conflicts, "manage" party expectations and deliver bad news in a way our clients can hear it in the next post.  Immediately hereafter.  

_______________________

**/   "Confirmation bias" refers to our "unwitting selectivity in the acquisition and use of evidence" in ways that are "partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand."  See Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises by Raymond S. Nickerson of Tufts University.

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Thanks to Anne Reed over at Deliberations for forwarding this April 22 Psychology NewsWire, It Pays to Know Your Opponent: Success in Negotiations Improved by Perspective-Taking, But Limited by Empathy.

It Pays refers to recent work done by Kellogg School of Management Professor Adam Galinsky, who has demonstrated (with colleagues William Maddux -- (INSEAD -- Debra Gilin -- St. Mary's U. --  and Judith White -- Dartmouth) that success in negotiations depends on focusing on the head and not the heart. In other words, it is better to take the perspective of negotiation opponents rather than to empathize with them. (You may remember Galinsky as the academic responsible for demonstrating that the person who makes the first offer will (nearly) always get the larger share of the delta between the two parties' "bottom lines."  See Making the First Offer here). 

Now Galinksy and friends inform us that we are far more likely to reach a negotiated resolution to a conflict if we use our heads rather than our hearts.  As It Pays reports:  

Perspective-taking, according to the study published in the April 2008 issue of Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, involves understanding and anticipating an opponent's interests, thoughts, and likely behaviors, whereas empathy focuses mostly on sympathy and compassion for another.

"Perspective takers are able to step outside the constraints of their own immediate, biased frames of reference," wrote the authors. "Empathy, however, leads individuals to violate norms of equity and equality and to provide preferential treatments."

The researchers performed a total of three studies designed to assess the relationship between successful negotiations and perspective-taking and empathy tendencies. In two of the studies, the participants negotiated the sale of a gas station where a deal based solely on price was impossible: the seller's asking price was higher than the buyer's limit. However, both parties' underlying interests were compatible, and so creative deals were possible. In the first study, those participants who scored highly on the perspective-taking portion of a personality inventory were more likely to successfully reach a deal. In contrast, higher scores on empathy led dyads to be less successful at reaching a creative deal. 

Why Enlightened Self-Interest Trumps Sympathy

Just when you were about to stereotype "negotiated resolutions" as commie-pinko limp-wristed new age aquarian left-of-liberal kum-by-ya marshmellow toaster solutions to the problems of (excuse me fellas) real men -- along comes new research once again demonstrating that negotiation requires hard heads rather than soft hearts. 

Why?

Because our competitive natures ("I need my stuff to survive") will almost always trump our collaborative inclinations ("we need each other to survive").  If this weren't so, the world wouldn't be divided into its current "pie pieces" -- the first, second and third worlds for instance.  

More particularly, because distributive non-interest based bargaining is all about getting "our share" of a fixed pie while interest-based or integrative negotiations require the parties to:  (1) learn about and attempt to satisfy their bargaining partners' often non-apparent needs and desires; and, (2) to collaborate in an effort to find ways to satisfy those needs and desires in novel and creative ways, reaching an integrative agreement becomes much more likely than reaching a purely distributive one. 

Why?

Because the integrative deal will -- by its very nature -- serve more of both parties' interests than would its distributive counter-part.  

Perspective-Taking, Sympathy and Foreclosure

I don't know my neighbors well.  They have a small family with very young children and keep pretty much to themselves.  I understand from the local grapevine, however, that they're selling their house because one of them lost their job and they can't make the mortgage payments.   

If we lived in another country or if the neighborhood belonged to certain religious sects that make it their business to take care of their own, we might all come together to help the neighbors save their house.  But we don't.

We have and express a lot of sympathy when we discuss our neighbors' plight.  "Must be hard for the kids," we say, "and the parents have worked so hard to improve the property.  It would be a shame if they