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Women in the United States Judiciary

2009 State Court Judges in the US:

• 4,325 women of 16,950 total
• 26% women

2008 Federal Court Judges

• 47 of 164 active judges on the thirteen federal courts of appeal are male (29%).
• 25% of United States district (or trial) court judges were women in 2008.

Women in Corporate America

• In November 2002, women represent 15.7% of the corporate officers in America’s 500 largest companies. These percentages are up from 12.5% in 2000 and 8.7% in 1995.
• In April 2002, there were six female CEOs in the Fortune 500 and a total of eleven in the Fortune 1000.
• The number of women corporate officers:  2,140 out of 13,673.
• The number of women corporate officers:  2,140 out of 13,673. T
• Almost 95% or 2,141 of the top earning corporate officers are men, compared to only 188 or 5.2% of women top earners in the Fortune 500.

Earnings on the Dollar Compared to Men

• Asian/other women: 67 cents
• White women: 59 cents
• African American women: 57 cents
• Hispanic women: 48 cents

Family

• Women managers are more likely to be single parents than male managers.
• Women managers who are unmarried and have children under 18: 22 percent African-American, 15 percent Hispanic, 8 percent White, and 5 percent Asian/other women.

Women Lawyers

 JOIN THE PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S NETWORK OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TODAY!  We're "on the ground" locally and online nationally.  Building business one relationship at a time.

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Here's a copy of the Judgment Confirming Final Arbitration Award.

Comment later.  In the meantime, Money Money Money from Cabaret.

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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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Although a California Court may properly sanction a non-party insurance carrier who possesses the authority to settle litigation for its failure to participate in a mandatory settlement conference, there is no statutory (nor inherent) authority given the Court to sanction the carrier or a party for its purported failure to negotiate in "good faith."  As the Court in Vidrio v. Hernandez (2d DCA) explained today:

In sum, even were we to agree with the trial court's assessment of the conduct of counsel and the [insurance] adjuster, the failure to increase a settlement offer or to otherwise participate meaningfully in settlement negotiations violates no rule of court and is not a proper basis for an award of sanctions.11 (See, e.g., Triplett v. Farmers Ins. Exchange (1994) 24 Cal.App.4th 1415, 1424 [“[w]e eschew any notion that a court may effectively force an unwilling party to settle by raising the specter of a post hoc determination that failure to do so will be evidence of failure to participate in good faith”]; Sigala v. Anaheim City School Dist., supra, 15 Cal.App.4th at p. 669 [“„[a] court may not compel a litigant to settle a case, but it may direct him to engage personally in settlement negotiations, provided the conditions for such negotiations are otherwise reasonable‟”].) [Defendant] filed an appropriate settlement conference statement; her lawyer and Mercury [the insurance carrier] attended the conference and participated in it. While the trial court‟s frustration at the parties‟ lack of movement is understandable, no more was required.
 

In particular, the Court of Appeal, held that the Court was not at liberty to "judge" whether the defendant and its carrier "should have" offered more than had previously been offered at a mediation either because the case was "worth" more or because the offer was so low in light of the attorneys fees and costs that would likely be incurred at trial.

I believe most mediators would approve of this ruling, even though it applies only to settlement conferences and not to mediations, the latter of which is protected from the Court's inquiry by Evidence Code section 1119.  Whether or not a mediator, a settlement judge, a party or a trial judge believes a defendant "should" offer more or a plaintiff "should" accept less by way of settlement, should not form the basis of an award of sanctions.  Not only would such a rule decrease citizens' trust and respect for the Courts, whose job it presumably is to provide a forum in which litigated disputes may be tried, such a rule would impermissibly chill the parties' Constitutional right to a jury trial.  

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Challenges to good faith settlements that cut off the rights of non-settling defendants to seek indemnification and contribution from settling defendants are nearly always doomed to failure.  Trial courts are understandably eager to clear their dockets and there's no docket-clean-up pitcher like the first defendant to settle.  Deny the motion and bring a settled defendant and his trial-ready resources back in to the litigation when the first defendant-domino has just successfully toppled over?   Not likely, my friend. Not in the trial court at any rate.

These motions are so difficult to oppose that I've seen a target defendant threaten a marginal player (my client) with sanctions just for challenging the target's very low six-figure settlement in an eight-figure antitrust action.

It looks like low value settlements got just a little bit harder to defend yesterday when the Second District Court of Appeal reversed a trial court's good faith settlement finding in  Long Beach Memorial Medical Center v. Superior Court (Conners).

Best quotation:  "The hospital contends that the physicians‟ $200,000 settlement -- representing 2 percent of plaintiffs‟ $10 million damages estimate -- was so far out of the “ballpark” it was not even in the parking lot."  With a first runner-up to "If section 877.6 is to serve the ends of justice, it must prevent a party from purchasing protection from its indemnification obligation at bargain-basement prices."

The Court of Appeal relied upon the following "facts" in finding that the trial court abused its considerable discretion in granting a good faith motion to defendant physicians in light of defendant hospital's opposition.

• payment of $200,000 in settlement for a $10 million claim, which the appellate court found to be "wholly disproportionate."  As the Court opined "[e]ven a slight probability of liability on [the settling doctor's] part would warrant a contribution more significant than 2 percent."
•  the "evidence" supporting the court's finding that the settling physician's probable fault was "not de minimis,"  which appears to have been based upon Plaintiff's attorney's fault analysis (not generally known for its unbiased nature) and the physicians' counsel's candid (?) suggestion that his clients' contribution to a global settlement might be in the range of $1.5 million;
• the availability of $2 million in coverage, which "militated against a good faith determination" because the settlement constituted only 10% of available policy limits [carrier alert here!];
• the non-settling Hospital's contention that the physicians and their attorneys engaged in "bad faith tactics" during two mediation sessions -- a factor the appellate court acknowledged it was barred by mediation confidentiality from considering -- but which it neatly avoided by concentrating on post-mediation negotiations; /*
• the timing of the physicians' settlement offer, which suggested to the appellate court that their "reason for entering into the settlement with plaintiffs was to cut off the hospital's . . .  right to indemnity from the physicians" (I thought that was a legitimate reason to settle litigation but see the Court's citation to Mattco Forge, stating that when a defendant  “enters into a disproportionately low settlement with the plaintiff solely to obtain immunity from the cross-complaint, the inference that the settlement was not made in good faith is difficult to avoid.” Mattco, supra (emphasis added); and,
• a consideration I've never seen defeat a good faith motion before - that a settlment "dictated by the tactical advantage of removing a deep-pocket defendant . . . is not made in 'good faith' consideration of the relevant liability of all parties. . . ." (leading to the question whether we're now required to consider the interests of clients other than our own in entering into a settlement agreement on a contested claim)

If this case isn't depublished (an unfortunate California practice) or taken up for review, it will bear re-reading and deeper thinking about the stategy and tactics of breaking away from the mob to cut a separate deal beneficial to one's own client without "consider[ing] . . the relevant liability of all parties . . . "

Comments welcome!!

________________

*/  This is a good place to note the importance of either indicating in the parties' post-mediation written negotiations that the mediation is continuing (hence the communications remain absolutely protected) or that the mediation has concluded (hence bringing those post-mediation settlement negotiations outside the scope of the strictly enforced mediation confidentiality restrictions).

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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 E-discovery implications of Twitter at Lawyers USA

The social networking site Twitter.com allows users just 140 characters to describe what the user is up to – a post known as a "tweet."

But lawyers advising clients on e-discovery or using Twitter themselves need to realize that tweets are discoverable.

"Twitter posts are like any other electronically stored information," explained Douglas E. Winter, a partner at Bryan Cave in Washington, D.C. and head of the firm's Electronic Discovery unit. "They are discoverable and should therefore be approached with all appropriate caution."The increasing popularity of Twitter has made electronic discovery even more complicated.

Litigators!  Remember, you and your opponent(s) have a choice. It's not only in arbitration that you can make your own law, but by way of stipulated case management orders cooperatively crafted with an eye toward relative cost and likely benefit (ask me for a template!)

I don't need to tell you that clients are cutting back in 2009.  The litigation practice that thrives will be the most efficient and effective dispute resolution vehicle on the road.

And now, for your moment of zen - Charlie Dickens.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port- wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers"--a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle--who was not well used--when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right.

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

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The National Law Journal's annoying practice of making its "best" content available only with a secret decoder ring forged in the fire of subscription dollars, nevertheless did not stop me from access to an intriguing article about arbitration's "e-discovery conundrum" (here for people with the secret code).

In Arbitration's e-Discovery Conundrum (thank you Mr. Thrifty for the copy) the author contends that:

. . . as litigation discovery techniques have become more prevalent in arbitration, arbitration has become just as time-consuming, expensive and burdensome. Without the benefit of an appeal process for the losing party, the primary remaining benefit for binding arbitration -- privacy -- is often outweighed by the other negative factors.

Parties and their litigation counsel have pointed to runaway discovery as one major reason why they have abandoned arbitration in favor of mediation in the United States and even internationally.

So how can "the long-recognized benefits of arbitration -- speed and cost savings -- be restored?"

(top:  is this what any of us went to law school for? Flowchart from Integreon)

The author recommends that the process must "address the needs and interests that led them to arbitration in the first place: to balance the need to discover those documents reasonably necessary for a party to prove its case with the cost, burden and time involved in producing such documents, while taking into account the need for fundamental fairness and to avoid surprise and trial by ambush."

Here's where reformers fail to get the direction the law is moving in.  It's not about finding a process that fits your needs - it's about creating the process that is tailor-made for your one and only completely unique and unrepeatable dispute.

The beauty of arbitration is not what it is.  It is what it can be.  The beauty of arbitration is that it allows you to make up your own $%#@^ law and procedure.  It restores control of the process to you.

What, you say?  Your opponent and you can't agree?  This is no longer a good enough reason, particularly because I do not see many attorneys making the effort to craft discovery and case management plans that reasonably addresses the parties' actual need for every document that someone marginally involved in the dispute might have once breathed upon.

I know whereof I speak.

The solution?  Sit down, for goodness sake, with your adversary, for as many days as it takes, to reach agreement about what each side actually needs.  Leave your huffing and your puffing, your posturing and your adversarial chops at the conference room door.  There will be plenty of time for all of that after the only people who actually understand the dispute -- YOU -- agree upon the type of process necessary to resolve it as efficiently and effectively as possible.

The law firms that do this will survive the recession. 

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FINRA Securities Arbitration or Class Action Lawsuits?

A common question asked by investment fraud victims is whether they should partake in a class action lawsuit of a securities arbitration claim. Often, investors are presented with a choice of either partaking in a class action lawsuit or FINRA arbitration action. As a general rule of thumb, investors are better off avoiding class action lawsuits. The recovery rate in class action lawsuits tend to be paltry. Please realize this is not always the case but it is very common.

The main reasons for why FINRA securities arbitration actions are typically better than class action lawsuits for investors include the following reasons…

Continue reading here.

By the way, I'm not expressing any opinion on this issue at the moment.  Just pointing you to one lawyer's view.

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Thanks LACBA for the daily case reports!

Trial court lacked authority to review discretionary, prehearing order by arbitrator, who imposed stay on arbitration of dispute concerning uninsured motorist policy until plaintiff--who was driving on work-related business in company car provided by employer when rear ended--pursued workers’ compensation benefits in light of Insurance Code Sec. 11580.2.

Briggs v. Resolution Remedies

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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.

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First she's all about the election and now she's back to post-mid-Century America's gender wars?  Say it ain't so, Vickie!

These are just statistics from an extremely limited sample that tells more about this particular program in this particular place concerning the particular types of cases being mediated than they are about the relative abilities of male and female mediators.

I'm unaware, however, of any controlled studies on gender differences in mediation results.  I do know that there's a gender imbalance in the profession and have had panel administrators acknowledge on the QT that even when they're choosing mediators or settlement officers pro bono lawyers tend to choose men most of the time.  

So for women struggling in the profession, here's your moment of zen.

Examining the graphical representation of mediator gender and settlement rates, one can see that there are male mediators who settle cases at higher than average rates, as well as female mediators who settle cases are lower than average rates. Nevertheless, it appears that most of the popular mediators who settle cases at higher than average rates are women, while the majority of popular mediators who settle cases at lower than average rates are men.

Some may object to this “battle of the sexes” analysis on the grounds that men and women should be treated as equals. Based on our data, however, male and female mediators are not statistically equal with respect to the rate at which they settle cases. Whether this “good” or “bad” is more a matter of philosophy than statistics.

In her book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan described how men and women think about moral conflicts differently. Her research suggests that men tend to consider conflict in terms of rights while women generally view conflicts in terms of dynamic relationships. Accordingly, a “female” approach to conflict resolution may be better suited to the process of facilitating mediated settlements than a “male” approach to conflict.

For a colored chart and remainder of post, see Correlation of Mediator Gender to Settlement Rate at Practical Dispute Resolution here.

When I think of my own experience as a neutral for the past four years and compare it to my experience as an attorney in the first four years of my practice 1980-1984, I can only say that it is somewhat similar.

What made the difference in the years that followed?  Women flooding the profession.  As women litigators and bench officers begin to retire, I suspect that we'll begin to see greater use of women neutrals.  And no, I do not believe that the paucity of women on commercial mediation panels nor what I believe to be their greater struggle to build a thriving practice there is based upon conscious sexism.

Like the tendency to prefer judges over attorney mediators (a preference I believe to be waning) I believe that the sub-conscious preference for male over female mediators arises from a continuing misunderstanding among members of the bar about what settles cases.  Too many attorneys continue to believe that they need a mediator who can overpower the will of their adversary.  And if you're looking for raw power (particularly the power of authority) in American commerce and law, you will naturally choose the judge over the attorney and the man over the woman.

I haven't written about this in the past because it is a topic that tends to divide people and it is not my intention to start a tiny gender war in the tiny world of mediation.

But when these statistics started pouring into my in-box, I couldn't ignore the topic any longer.

Please feel free to comment.

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It's official!  I've joined the faculty of Solo Practice University™

Huh?

I don't see that University in any tier of the U.S. News and World Report's Law School Rankings!  And if it's not ranked for goodness sakes, does it even exist?

Yes, Virginia, a school for legal practitioners does exist "as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy."

O.K.,Solo Practice University™ is not Santa Claus but it comes pretty darn close.

Solo Practice University™ is a revolutionary new web-based educational community that picks up where your legal education left off.

Learn from some of the most progressive lawyers, marketing pros, technology consultants and legal business giants how to:

* Plan, build and grow your private practice
* Differentiate yourself from the competition
* Attract and engage new clients more easily

… and much more. They just can’t teach you that in law school.

Need to transform your marketing strategy in these troubled economic times?  You can learn  not just how to blog your way into your desired market, but how to leverage what you love into how much you make from Blawgfather and SPU Professor Grant Griffiths.

Wondering whether to put rocket fuel into your networking vehicle by adding online social media?  You couldn't find a better teacher than SPU Professor Toby Bloomberg who has over 15-years of traditional strategic marketing experience and four years with social media through her company Bloomberg Marketing/Diva Marketing.

Are your clients peppering you with questions you can't answer about their rights and remedies in Cyberspace?  Then it is Christmas, Hannukah and Kawanza all rolled up into one when SPU Professor Brett Trout is teaching a course on intellectual property in cyberspace.

Whether your presence in Cyberspace is solo or in connection with a group practice, let SPU Professor Stephanie L. Kimbo help you hang out your virtual shingle. 

Don't yet know your way around the courtroom?  Thinking of adding criminal defense to your practice as a growth industry in troubled economic times?  Need to ask questions of a seasoned trial attorney that would make you feel inadequate to ask of your supervising attorney in the PD's office?  There's no better winter holiday gift than SPU Professor Scott Greenfield's semester-long course “The Practice of Criminal Defense - The Road to Perdition.”

Still waiting to take that first deposition?  Taking your 20th and can't stop worrying that the Court Reporter thinks you're just a tiny bit pathetic?  Don't know how to deal with obstreperous opposing counsel?  Afraid to run a line of killer cross-examination to re-position your case for summary judgment or settlement?  Wish you'd gotten the expert to admit that he'd consider the moon to be green cheese if his attorney had told him to assume it? (yes my partner did). 

Then you'll want to sign up for my Deposition Skills course based upon the NITA techniques I've taught for more than a dozen years and my own OJT during a 25-year commercial legal practice.

Let your real legal education begin at Solo Practice University™

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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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If you believe that law blogging is not only informative and entertaining, but capable of transforming our lives, our society, our culture and our legal system as well, run don't walk over to Peter Black's Freedom to Differ which not only rocks, it twitters, on One Web Day.  Surely this will be the BlawgReview of the year!

. . . .one recurring theme on this blog has always been a recognition of the value in a strong and free internet.  Therefore it is an honour to be able to host Blawg Review on Monday September 22, 2008, which is One Web Day 2008.  One Web Day was founded three years ago by Professor Susan Crawford from the University of Michigan, and she describes it as an "Earth Day for the internet".  The One Web Day website describes the day in the following terms:

The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet.  So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.

If you'd like to host BlawgReview or submit to it, click here.  All future BlawgReview hosts please note -- THE BAR HAS BEEN RAISED!

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The following important update on the recovery of bad faith treble damages from the lawyers at  Edwards, Angell, Palmer & Dodge

California Federal Court: Insured Plaintiff Can Seek Treble Punitive Damages For Insurer’s Alleged Bad Faith

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California recently denied a motion to strike and allowed a plaintiff to pursue treble punitive damages against his insurer for the insurer’s alleged bad faith. Novick v. UNUM Life Insurance Co. of America, C.A. No. 08-02830-DDP-PJW (Aug. 7, 2008).

The insurer issued a long term disability benefits policy to the plaintiff in 1976, providing benefits should the plaintiff become totally disabled due to an accident sustained during the course of his career as a surgeon. In June 1992, the plaintiff filed a disability claim with his insurer after sustaining a spinal injury that allegedly prevented him from performing surgery. The insurer initially paid benefits to the plaintiff, but discontinued making the benefits payments on January 18, 2007. Shortly thereafter, the plaintiff filed suit against its insurer alleging breach of contact and breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

In his complaint, plaintiff seeks punitive damages pursuant to California Civil Code §3294, which allows an award of punitive damages for conduct that constitutes malice, fraud or oppression. The plaintiff also seeks treble punitive damages pursuant to California Civil Code §3345, which provides for an award of treble damages “in actions brought by, on behalf of, or for the benefit of senior citizens or disabled persons . . . to redress unfair and deceptive acts or practices or unfair methods of competition . . . [when] a trier of fact is authorized by statute to impose either a fine, or a civil penalty or other penalty, or any other remedy for the purpose or effect of which is to punish or deter . . . .”

The insurer argued that §3345 does not provide for the trebling of damages for insurance bad faith claims. The court reviewed the legislative intent behind the statute and determined that the legislature did not intend for the statute to be limited to actions that specifically mention unfair business practices. The court noted that, as bad faith claims redress unfair practices, §3345 applies to insurance bad faith claims. Accordingly, as the plaintiff alleges that the insurer acted in bad faith, the court held that the plaintiff is entitled to pursue his request for treble punitive damages.

Full text of opinion here.

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I note today that yesterday's post was . . . . well . . . a little snippy.  

Now that I've managed to get my hands on a copy of Professor Murray's article on the privitization of justice (which I'll post as soon as someone gives me permission to do so) I have a few more observations that are more nuanced than my first reaction.

First, I note that much of Professor Murray's article focuses on arbitration agreements that are forced down the throats of consumers -- an injustice that is so far removed from one that might arise in a mediated settlement conference that I'd like to address it separately on another day.  

Second, I am not without criticism of court-annexed mediation practices -- those criticisms populate this blog in great number.  Nor am I naive or inexperienced enough to pretend that mediators do not effect party decisions even when they are represented by attorneys who are presumably mediation- and mediator-savvy.     

Nevertheless, re-reading Professor Murray's criticisms of mediation this morning, I am once again stuck by the number of untested assumptions upon which he bases his pretty radical suggestion that mediated settlement agreements be vetted by judicial officers. The major and minor premises of Professor Murray's accusation that mediation corrupts justice include the following:

• there is only one set of "powerful repeat players" -- insurance companies -- who choose and use the services of mediators;
• the other set of repeat players -- plaintiffs' personal injury and employment counsel -- are more or less universally poorly equipped to either influence the mediator or to protect their clients from mediator bias;
• the easily influenced plaintiffs' bar, if not protected from mediator bias, will counsel their clients to voluntarily enter into sub-optimal settlement agreements that favor the interests of insurance carriers over those of their own clients';
• there is such a thing as an "objectively bad settlement" that a judicial officer would be  equipped to detect and remedy; 
• money paid to a "neutral" is the only pernicious influence on dispute outcome, as opposed to, say, racial, nationality, gender, and/or any other socio-economic differences between a judicial officer and a litigant or between the jury and a litigant; and,
• judicial officers are not subject to the influence of the repeat attorney-players who appear before them and socialize with them at Bar Association and other events.

Of all of the assumptions requiring testing before we impose a supervisory judiciary upon mediators, the premise that an objective, measureably "reasonable" settlement of any dispute exists is the one that most requires addressing.  

Because I could write a book on this topic, let me just highlight some of the factors that would make third-party vetting of mediated settlement agreements difficult to impossible. 

• money is not the only reason people file suit nor the only basis for their decision to settle it;
• whether the litigation at issue is a $2500 slip and fall action between a local grocery store and its customer; or a billion dollar insurance coverage dispute between an insurance carrier and an oil company, the people and commercial players involved are at least as -- if not more -- concerned with injustices that the law does not address as they are with those that it can address;
• though mediated settlement agreements are partially based upon the cost of further litigation and trial, on the one hand, and the probability of victory times the potential jury verdict on the other hand, they are also based on party needs, desires and fears that have nothing whatsoever to do with legal causes of action such as:
  • a corporation's fear that it will not be able to overcome jury bias against commercial enterprises, particularly if that enterprise is engaged in providing liability and/or property damage insurance to its customers;
  • the fear of individuals that they will not be able to overcome jury bias against any marker of their marginalization from the dominant culture such as color, gender, nationality, sexuality or religion;
  • the desire that one's opponent acknowledge responsibility for the role he/she/it played in the events giving rise to the dispute and for the actions taken to resolve it, many of which further inflame the parties' experience of injustice; 
  • party desires for revenge; and,
  • party tendencies to "read" and "spin" the dispute in a way that is favorable to him/her/it in all particulars -- misperceptions that are often corrected in the course of joint sessions between the parties who actually experienced the injury-causing event.

Examples of ways in which parties are able to resolve conflict in the context of their highly individual interests rather than the little buckets of rights and remedies into which we pour the facts of their dispute?

• a physician gives his consent to settle a malpractice action when he realizes that the Plaintiff is not attempting to "hold him up" but genuinely experienced the breast examination he gave her as an assault;
• the creditor agrees to settle for pennies on the dollar when convinced by evidence proffered during a confidential mediation session that the debtor would be bankrupted by any payment in excess of the offer (evidence not discoverable in litigation because it is not "relevant" to the causes of action alleged);
• garment manufacturers settle acrimonious copyright infringement litigation after their counsel allow them to have a confidential mediation conversation which cannot be used in court against them during which they learn that they have more in common -- and more ways to advantage one another economically -- than they have to fight about;
• a claims adjuster is brought to tears -- and seeks greater settlement authority -- by a father's frank confession in a confidential mediation conversation of the guilt he carries for the loss of his child in an automobile accident caused by the  high speed blow-out of an allegedly defective tire; and,
• family members not only settle their lawsuit but reconcile after years of self-imposed exile when they realize the "family" asset they've been fighting over is worth less to them than their love for one another. 

What I'd like Professor Murray and everyone who reads his article to understand is that we all share this justice problem.  The adjudication system is not working well for the people it was designed to serve.  The ADR options we've put in place to smooth out the rough edges of 18th century adversarial theory and practice are themselves insufficient to efficiently and fairly resolve 21st century conflicts.      

That's why I'm calling for a LegalTED Conference.  And if Professor Murray will forgive the snippiness of yesterday's post, I'd like him to be one of the members of  the Steering Committee.

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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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Although I do I try to steer clear of politics, I simply cannot resist during this compelling political week and particularly on this historic day. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the mark of a first rate intelligence is the ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory ideas in your mind.  I aspire to having a first rate intelligence.  Particularly today. 

I do not support Obama because he is bi-racial.  Nor did I support Hillary because she was a woman.  I'm an old fashioned party Democrat.  The Republicans could nominate a gay disabled mixed "race" black and asian orphan from Spanish Harlem and I would not vote for him or her. 

I nevertheless pause the Negotiation Blog this evening to celebrate the great effort -- the individual and collective acts of heroism as well as the small daily tender merices -- that have moved us so far beyond the society in which I was raised -- one in which Southern de jure and the Northern de facto segregation was an accepted fact -- never to be altered.  

I was proud of all of us and of our legal system just a couple of weeks ago when the Bratz/MGA jury "outed" a prejudiced member of the panel who spoke ill of Iranians as a group in a case in which one of the defendants was of Persian ancestry. 

And I'm proud again today.  

That's it.  An executive summary of my optimistic heart.   Below, the pessimism that keeps me from walking off cliffs while gazing at the clouds.

I give you from Frank Pasquale's post at Concurring Opinions today -- Inspiration and Realism in Denver -- the pessimistic part from Patricia J. Williams.    

But there are many signs that the struggle is only beginning. Jacob Weisberg canvasses the lingering legacy of racism in the US, and Patricia J. Williams puts it in vivid detail:

[W]hile some of us are listening to the soothing tones of National Public Radio, a much larger audience—and larger by millions—is listening to Rush Limbaugh singing those subterranean fears of “Barack, the magic Negro,” or to radio shock jocks cackling about “jigaboos,” or to Pat Buchanan fretting that Obama is a radical, unpatriotic, extremist “elitist” to whom the liberal media hands a pass as a “special-ed,” “affirmative-action” candidate. Not that any of them mean it in a racist way. Hey, lighten up. Don’t you have a sense of humor?
 

We can continue to make this union more perfect. 

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(while we're walking down memory lane anyway, "Have It Your Way" from 1976) 

When I ask litigators why they don't choose arbitration over litigation before unpredictable judges in a crowded court, their answer invariably is "because I can't appeal the ruling."   We cling to appellate review even though we appeal fewer cases than we try -- which is a very small percentage of our case load as it is. 

Not surprising, however, we litigators, as Max Kennerly recently noted, tend to be risk-averse, not risk-embracing (h/t Blawg Review # 174).  To give up that one last chance for our client to be vindicated and for us to be triumphant is generally just too much for us. 

Now we can have our arbitration cake and and follow it up with appellate ice cream.  Yesterday, the California Supreme Court in Cable Connection, Inc. v. DirecTV  held that arbitrating parties' agreement to seek appellate review of legal errors is enforceable in California State Courts despite its uneforceability in federal court.  As the Supreme Court explained:

On the first question, the United States Supreme Court has held that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA; 9 U.S.C. § 1 et seq.) does not permit the parties to expand the scope of review by agreement. (Hall Street Associates, L.L.C. v. Mattel, Inc. (2008) __ U.S. __ [128 S.Ct. 1396, 1404-1405] (Hall Street).)

However, the high court went on to say that federal law does not preclude “more searching review based on authority outside the [federal] statute,” including “state statutory or common law.” (Id. at p. __ [128 S.Ct. at p. 1406].) In Moncharsh v. Heily & Blase (1992) 3 Cal.4th 1 (Moncharsh), this court reviewed the history of the California Arbitration Act (CAA; Code Civ. Proc., § 1280 et seq.).

We adhere to our holding in Moncharsh, recognizing that contractual limitations may  alter the usual scope of review.

The California rule is that the parties may obtain judicial review of the merits by express agreement. There is a statutory as well as a contractual basis for this rule; one of the grounds for review of an arbitration award is that “[t]he arbitrators  exceeded their powers.”  (§§ 1286.2, subd. (a)(4), 1286.6, subd. (b).)

Here, the parties agreed that “[t]he arbitrators shall not have the power to commit errors of law or legal reasoning, and the award may be vacated or corrected on appeal to a court of competent jurisdiction for any such error.” This contract provision is enforceable under state law, and we reverse the contrary ruling of the Court of Appeal.

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AUGUST 25, 2008 | FORUM

If You Know the Case Law, Litigation Doesn't Have to be Robotic

By Victoria Pynchon 

Here in California, there's no stronger rule of confidentiality than that applied to a mediation. It cannot be impliedly waived like most privileges, including the near-sacred attorney-client privilege. Simmons v. Ghaderi, 2008 DJDAR 11107. You cannot be estopped from relying on it. Eisendrath v. Superior Court, 109 Cal.App.4th 351 (2003). And if you want your mediated settlement agreement enforced, you must strictly comply with the requirements of Evidence Code Section 1123. Fair v. Bakhtiari, 40 Cal.4th 189 (2006).

Insurance policy-holder counsel Kirk Pasich of Dickstein Shapiro has criticized nearly all recent interpretations of mediation confidentiality by the California Supreme Court on the ground that they permit insurance carriers to use mediation proceedings to engage in acts of bad faith.

"Why should a carrier get a license to act in bad faith in mediation," Pasich asked, adding, "Cases settled, and still settle, in mandatory settlement conferences without that same shield. I don't think a process should exist that encourages, rather than discourages, a party from acting in bad faith."

Why, indeed?

If you do not understand the differences between settlement conferences and mediations, you are not alone. My informal surveys indicate that litigators believe there's no difference whatsoever between the two and few mediators are able to distinguish between them despite their training in the field. Nor have California's courts been of any real assistance.

What's in a name? Here, plenty. The application of California's Rules of Evidence to mediations has such significant potential economic consequences that mediator and litigator malpractice actions are surely looming on the horizon.

What type of misbehavior can occur in a mediation? Here are just a few examples: One party can make a misrepresentation of material fact on which the other relies in entering into a settlement agreement; as Pasich notes, an insurance carrier can act in bad faith; one mediating party could tortiously interfere with a third party's contract or prospective economic advantage; or the mediating parties can enter into a collusive settlement agreement, depriving the settling parties' co-defendants from learning facts necessary to challenge the settlement in a "good faith" hearing.

Even if all parties have expressed complete agreement during the mediation, which they then memorialize in a term sheet, absent strict compliance with the requirements of Evidence Code Section 1123, no evidence probative of that agreement will be admissible in a California court.
If the mediating parties are engaged in a settlement conference, none of this potentially bad behavior would be protected.

Given the potentially significant adverse economic consequences that can flow from a mediation, California's courts have clarified the differences between the two procedures, right?

Not so much.

If you have a DJ subscription, continue reading here.

Enforcement of Mediated Settlement Agreements in California - Get more Legal Forms

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Judge Alexander Williams' retirement from the bench and entry into private neutral practice with ADR Services is good news for the legal community.  I co-mediated dozens of cases with the Judge while I was earning my LL.M from the Straus Institute and have spent many hours discussing the nuances of mediation practice with him.  Once known for his temper (and the bow tie he appears to have forgotten to wear in the photo at right)  the Judge has learned the rewards of patience. 

Always one of the Los Angeles Superior Court's most charming and articulate bench officers, Williams is now also among the most calm and canny settlement officers available in a town fairly crawling with mediators.  Couple his bench strength with an Ivy League intelligence and unusual depth of knowledge of mediation theory and practice, and you have one of the new go-to guys on the block.

An excerpt from the Daily Journal's article on Judge Williams below with a link if you're a subscriber to read the entire article.

Retired Judge's New Mantra: 'Deal or Ordeal'

By Greg Katz

LOS ANGELES - Superior Court Judge Alexander H. Williams III is about to take his first job ever in the private sector. He will step down from the bench Sept. 15 and join Century City's ADR Services as a mediator.

Williams started his law career in the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps in 1969, worked as an assistant U.S. attorney from 1975 to 1984, and then was appointed to the bench by Gov. George Deukmejian.

Even earlier than that, he worked briefly as a police officer in his native Virginia.

"My very first day on the job, I wrecked a police car on a railroad track," a catastrophe that made the front page of a local newspaper, he said with a laugh.

His dispute resolution career isn't likely to be a trainwreck, though.

Once known for his fiery temper - "I used to be a judge beating up on parties," he told the Daily Journal in 2004 - Williams long since has reversed that reputation.

After studying mediation at Pepperdine University's Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution 10 years ago, Williams began to settle nearly all the cases in his courtroom. His skill and advocacy for dispute resolution won him the Southern California Mediation Association's Peacemaker of the Year award in 2003.

To continue reading, click here.

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In some cases -- complex construction litigation comes to mind -- fees for a referee can be one of the most substantial costs of litigation.  Yesterday, the Fifth District California Court of Appeal held that a stipulated judicial reference agreement under CCP 638 precludes recovery of prevailing party's fifty percent share of the referee's fees as an item of costs if the parties have agreed in the reference stipulation to split the referee fees.

Solution?  Include in your agreement a provision indicating that the prevailing party in the litigation will be entitled to recover its half of the referee's fees.

See Carr Business Enterprises, Inc. v. City of Chowchilla with gratitude to the Met News for briefing these cases for us and to LACBA for putting them in our in-box every evening.

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Check out today's post at the IP ADR Blog on the Supreme Court's mediation confidentiality decisions and ways to protect your client from the resulting pitfalls -- Malpractice Alert:  Is it a Settlement Conference or a Mediation? 

Why you should care about the answer and what you can do to protect your client and yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

And then the system kicks in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're not complaining about this, really.

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

But doesn't it sometimes feel a tad random?

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

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

But we digress.

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

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

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UPDATE:  See the analysis of Thottam at May it Please the Court, noting that the "big print giveth and the small print taketh away."

Before further discussing the problems created by the Thottam holding, I'm providing a "brief" of the case about which I ranted and raved earlier here today.  

• THE FACTS: 
  • A mediation confidentiality agreement entered into by the parties in Thottam provided that “all matters discussed, agreed to, admitted to, or resulting from ... [the mediation meeting]...
    • "shall be kept confidential and not disclosed to any outside person . . . ;
    • "shall not be used in any current or future litigation between us (except as may be necessary to enforce any agreements resulting from the Meeting), and,
    • "shall be considered privileged and, as a settlement conference, non-admissible under the California Evidence Code in any current or future litigation between us.”  
  • One of the parties contended that a chart drawn up and signed by the parties during the mediation, 
    • was sufficiently certain to be enforced according to its terms; and,
    • was admissble into evidence under section 1123(c) despite its failure to satisfy any of 1123(c)'s requirements.
  • THE RULES:
    • Evidence Code section 1123(c) provides that a "written settlement agreement prepared in the course of, or pursuant to, a mediation, is not made inadmissible, or protected from disclosure . . . if
      • "the agreement is signed by the settling parties and any of the following conditions are satisfied . . .
      • "(c) all parties to the agreement expressly agree in writing . . . to its disclosure."Id. (emphasis added).
  • PROCEEDINGS IN THE TRIAL COURT
    • Without finding that the settlement "chart" constituted a "written settlement agreement" under section 1123, the Thottam trial court required one of the parties to testify about otherwise confidential mediation communications because the Confidentiality Agreement required the disclosure of mediation confidences "necessary to enforce any agreements resulting from the [mediation.]"
    • Apparently before Elizabeth could testify, the civil action to enforce the alleged settlement agreement was consolidated with other proceedings in the Probate Court,
    • at the trial of the consolidated matters, the Probate Judge refused to accept the settlement chart into evidence because it did not comply with the provisions of section 1123(c).
  • THE APPELLATE DECISION
    • the appellate court reversed the Probate Court's decision.
  • THE HOLDINGS
    • Section 1123(c)'s requirement that all parties to a mediated settlement agreement "expressly agree in writing . . . to its disclosure,"
      
      • may be satisfied by terms contained in a writing other than the alleged settlement agreement itself; and,
      • may be satisfied by terms contained in a writing executed before any alleged settlement agreement has purportedly been entered into.
    • Here, the Confidentiality Agreement satisfied those requirements; and,
    • The skeletal written settlement chart was enforceable because its material terms were, or could be made, certain. 
  • RATIONALE
    • Because the proceeding in which Appellant attempted to introduce the alleged settlement agreement was an action "to enforce what he claims is a settlement agreement reached in mediation," and,
    • the parties carved out of the Confidentiality Agreement any discussions that were "necessary to enforce any agreements resulting from the [mediation]"
    • the Confidentiality Agreement satisfied the requirements of section 1123(c); and,
    • the skeletal Settlement Chart was therefore admissible in evidence under that subsection.

This opinion threatens to blow a hole in sections 1119 and 1123 large enough to obliterate their protections -- protections that have been repeatedly enforced to the letter of the law by the Supreme Court in its fairly recent Fair v. Bahktiari opinion -- holding that parties to a mediated settlement agreement must include in it an express provision that they intend to be bound thereby -- and Simmons v. Ghaderi  in which the Court held that parties cannot impliedly waive confidentiality nor be estopped from asserting it.

Most Confidentiality Agreements I've seen (and used) naturally carve out an exception for the enforcement of a settlement agreement.  If you sign such an agreement after Thottam, you risk the enforcement of a non-1123-compliant "settlement agreement" and risk being required to disclose otherwise confidential mediation communications on the sole ground that one of the parties alleges that the opposition entered into an enforceable settlement agreement during the mediation.    

Were I attempting to resist the disclosure of mediation confidences my adversary claimed should be fair game under Thottam, I'd contend that the Thottam Confidentiality agreement, and hence its carve-out, was unusually broad and that the Court's holding should therefore be read narrowly and limited to its facts.  

As California lawyers know, the Second Appellate District has jurisdiction over matters litigated in the Los Angeles Superior Court.  It is therefore particularly important to take a look at the impact this decision might have upon matters mediated by the neutrals on that Court's pro bono or party pay panels.  All such parties are required to sign a Confidentiality Agreement that protects from disclosure all mediation-related "written" and "oral communication[s] made by any party, attorney, neutral, or other participant in any ADR session" except  "written settlement agreement[s] reached as a result of this ADR proceeding in an action to enforce that settlement."

Under Thottam, a colorable argument could be made that the mandatory Superior Court Agreement's confidentiality "carve-out" should be treated as either:

• an express agreement by the parties to waive confidentiality for the purpose of enforcing "written settlement agreement[s]" even if they do not satisfy the requirements of section 1123(c); and/or,
• a part of the alleged settlement agreement so that the two agreements together (confidentiality carve-out + non-compliant settlement agreement) satisfy the requirements of section 1123(c).

What to do?  Don't sign any Confidentiality agreement that could possibly be interpreted in a manner similar to the one subject of Thottam unless you want to risk the disclosure of mediation confidences arising from a writing that does not comply with section 1123(c).    

You can certainly refuse to sign the Superior Court's agreement in light of the Thottam holding.  I don't know as a matter of Court policy whether that limits parties' ability to use the Court's pro bono or party pay mediators. 

I'd have to say that this case puts confidences made in mediation sessions controlled by the Superior Court's Confidentiality Agreement at risk whenever one party is contending that the other entered into an agreement pursuant to a signed term sheet.

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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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In the actual news (the New York Times) are the results of a new study finding that

most . . . plaintiffs who decided to pass up a settlement offer and went to trial ended up getting less money than if they had taken that offer . . . 

Plaintiffs, however, are not the only ones who made the "wrong" decision -- defendants were mistaken in 24% of the cases.  Defense errors, however, were far more costly. 

getting it wrong cost plaintiffs . . . about $43,000 . . . For defendants, who were less often wrong about going to trial, the cost was . . . . $1.1 million.  

What to do?

It's no answer to say " take the last best settlement offer,"  though one party or the other will 80 to 90 percent of the time and often on the courthouse steps, i.e., at the point of a gun when decision-making is at its most flawed. 

Nor, I must concede, is the answer simply mediation, which is, after all, pretty much a pig in a poke.  Why?  Because mediation practice ranges all the way from

• a retired judge bullying an "injured, situationally-weakened client with no negotiation skills" (cf. Max Kennerly's recent post at  the Litigation and Trial Blog) or disrespecting a marginalized defendant (cf. Dr. Ghaderi)  
• to a mediator who knows only how to repeat "trial is expensive and the result uncertain"
• to a settlement officer who does nothing more than shuttle numbers back and forth between two rooms
• to a "transformative" mediator who allows the parties free reign to "vent" their "feelings" without helping them get a grip on the very real and serious consequences of the negotiated resolution that has been proposed to them.  

A friend of mine who is a psychoanalyst once told me that patients get better in therapy despite their analysts' "technique."  It's the relationship that's curative, she told me.  A patient in need will find the water of healing in the desert of a therapist's theory.  If the same can be said of mediation -- that it's the relationship that's curative -- the question that naturally arises is whose relationship?  

Why the disputants of course, which is why I recommend joint sessions.  Not stylized adversarial position-based, chest-thumping, shoe-banging joint sessions ("we will bury you") but interest-based, inquisitive, collaborative, reality-testing mediator-and-attorney directed negotiation sessions. 

Before talking about joint sessions, however, let's look at the problem every litigator faces when advising his/her client whether to accept, make, or reject a settlement offer.  

The Problem in Bullet-Points

• we can't predict the future (darn)
• we think so much like lawyers that we've fogotten how to talk to juries like normal people (cf. Gerry Spence)
• too few of us get to try enough cases to be any good at predicting results based on experience
• we're subject to all the cognitive biases every other human being is, including,
  • self-serving bias -- the tendency to evaluate ambiguous information in a way that "fits" our existing view of the world
  • egocentric bias --  recalling the past in a self-serving manner
  • hind-sight bias -- filtering memory of past events through present knowledge
  • bias blind spot -- the tendency not to compensate for our biases 
  • optimism bias — the systematic tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions
  • overconfidence effect -- when we say we're 99% certain, we're wrong 40% of the time
  •  fundamental attribution error -- the tendency to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences and reversing this error when the behavior at issue is our own.
  • Just-world phenomenon — the tendency for people to believe that the world is "just" and therefore people "get what they deserve"
• We get so stuck in our positions that we fail to ask diagnostic questions that have been proven to result in significantly better negotiated outcomes for both parties.
• We're so averse to leaving money on the table that we walk away from negotiations without having learned that our respective "bottom lines" actually overlap

Joint Sessions

My friend Judge Alexander Williams -- the soon to retire full-time settlement Judge in the downtown Los Angeles Superior Court -- has the following poster hanging in his jury room.

The surface is what the lawyers know.

The depth and breath; the texture and particularity; the details of the dispute and the desire for justice that exists on both sides, is known only to the litigants.  And they haven't (and won't) tell you what they know or want.

Why you should never leave a mediation or settlement conference without letting a skilled mediator facilitate a joint session in which the litigants can explore their joint interests and conflicting goals will be the subject of my next post.

See also Nuts and Boalts (You Had Me at Your Initial Offer) which directs us to Prospect Theory as a good explanation for our settlement errors.

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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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Check out Underdog's Blog post Practicing non-anger if you're feeling stressed and cranky.   Because there's a riot of unruly pre-school children residing inside of me, I too center myself as often as possible by remembering that everything is internconnected.  Here's what DUI attorney Jon Katz does to keep himself from boiling over.  

One approach I try to use in staying consistently calm and not angry is in focusing on how everyone ultimately is interconnected. Those who reach such a view from a deeply-held religious perspective -- which I do not, still remaining an agnostic who is into Judaism and Buddhism nonetheless -- might have an easier time sticking to the view than I do.

In any event, the more we see that we are interconnected, the less we will be tempted to cause disharmony to others and the more we will want to help everyone rise as we rise, and not to try to pull them into a ditch even if we find ourselves in one.

Read the remainder of the post here.

I was just telling Mr. Thrifty over the dinner dishes that my life as a litigator got far far better when one of my biggest and most enduring pieces of litigation was assigned to Judge Carolyn Kuhl over at the Complex Court here in Los Angeles.  She set such an even-tempered example that opposing counsel and I aspired to live up to it.  We wanted to please her.  Everything got better after that.  

That led me to think about the way Judges' ill tempers effects their dockets.  The Judge bats the attorneys around the courtroom like cat toys and they begin to behave like caged animals on an electrified grid.  The attorneys behave badly and that irritates the Judge who demeans and belittles them.  The attorneys then demean and belittle each other and everyone is trapped in the vicious cycle. 

Maybe if Judges realized that they have this effect on attorneys, they'd adjust their own attitudes and see the attorney wrangling before them chill out a little.

Thanks for the wise words, Jon.

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My favorite local bankruptcy mediators

Ben Siegel of Buchalter (left)

former bankruptcy judge Herb Katz (right)

Bankruptcy mediation catches on nationwide

A decade ago, there were only a handful of mediation programs in bankruptcy courts.

Long associated with family law disputes, mediation programs were slow to catch on in complex business litigation, including bankruptcy cases.

But that's changing.

More than two-thirds of the 90 bankruptcy courts have mediation available, according to Robert Niemic, senior attorney at the Federal Judicial Center. Even more offer some other form of alternative dispute resolution, such as judicial settlement conferences.

In the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, more than 3,800 cases have been referred to mediation since 1995. About 64 percent of those cases were resolved through settlements.

To keep costs down, the first day of mediation is free. Parties choose from a list of 200 attorneys and non-attorneys, such as accountants and financial experts, who volunteer as mediators.

Chief Bankruptcy Court Judge Barry Russell, who launched the mediation program in 1995, said that most cases settle in a day, producing major cost savings for both the court and the parties involved.

For full article, click here.

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Florida Insurance Commissioner Praises Mandatory Arbitration Ban

Thanks to the LexisNexis Insurance Center Staff

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty welcomed the First District Court of Appeal's decision affirming the Office of Insurance Regulation's denial of United Insurance Company of America's request to include a mandatory arbitration clause in its life insurance contracts.

Arbitration would have forced disgruntled policyholders to bypass the legal system to settle disagreements. United appealed OIR's action and the court affirmed the denial.

"Policyholders have fewer rights and constitutional protections under the more restrictive arbitration process than they would have in a civil court proceeding," said McCarty. "I'm pleased that the Court made it clear that Florida consumers should not be shut out of the traditional legal system to press their grievances against insurance companies."

Although United argued that federal arbitration law superseded the Florida law that allows policyholders to use the courts for contractual disputes, the Court stated that the matter "specifically relates to the business of insurance" and was, therefore, exempt from being superseded by federal law

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This may be the biggest break-down in attorney-client communication in the history of litigation.  Because this public statement by Allstate about its former attorney would be highly defamatory if not true, I'm taking Allstate at its word here.   

Allstate claimed that it had not deliberately flouted Manners’ orders. Rather, it said, its now-former attorney — then with the firm of Wallace, Saunders, Austin, Brown & Enochs — had failed to respond to discovery requests.

Allstate said it was appalled when it learned last year that it was being threatened with contempt.

“Allstate litigates hundreds of bad faith cases each year,” Allstate stated in court documents. “And it responds to discovery requests — just like the ones in this case — in many of them. There is no reason in the world for Allstate not to participate in discovery — particularly in this case, where there is an underlying judgment of $1 million.”

Allstate said it “immediately removed” the attorney from the case and retained new counsel.

Read the article about the lifting of the daily $25,000 contempt sanctions against Allstate in the wake of its settlement of the bad faith action in which they were imposed here.

The answer to the question "how to break bad news to my client" can be found at any of the links below.  Most of these links are for health care professionals, who have to break bad news to their patients and their families far more often than we have to tell our clients that something went terribly awry.  Put that at the top of your attorney gratitude list.

The Breaking Bad News Web Site

Breaking Bad News by Telephone

A Framework for Breaking Bad News  (anyone who read my Negotiating Life's End series knows that my father's physician could have used this excellent framework for delivering bad medical news to a patient's family)

Another excellent British source on breaking bad news listing the following traps for the unwary (partial list):

• Do not avoid seeing the [client] or leave them anxiously waiting for news. Sometimes anticipation can be worse than even the worst reality.
• Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
• Get the facts before you start.
• Make sure you will not be disturbed. If necessary switch off phones or bleeps.
• Be factual but sympathetic. Always be empathetic however you may feel personally.
• Give time for the information to sink in and the opportunity to ask questions before moving on. Do not seem rushed.
• If the [client] does not seem able to take any more be prepared to end the consultation and to take it up again later.
• Look for all the cues, verbal or others. , , , Perhaps they would like you to speak to someone else or to have someone with them for the next meeting.
• Never say that nothing can be done or the [client] will lose all hope.
• Whilst trying to be positive never lose track of the fact that this is a serious and potentially fatal [reverse in the litigation].  Be optimistic but do not promise success or anything else that may not be delivered.

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Thanks to Anne Reed at Deliberations for following California case law on juror misconduct and bias.  I won't steal her thunder -- click here for What is the Sound of One Juror Clapping?

I will, however, provide the appellate court's comment on human fallability -- a recognition we all need to carry into any settlement conference or mediation with us.  Vast conspiracies are the rare one-off.  As Al Gore once said -- we think we can evacuate the planet but not New Orleans?  It's our human capacity for error coupled with our human tendency to search the field for someone to blame that accounts for most unresolved conflict.  Here's the local Met News article on the opinion and the appellate opinion itself (from our own Second District here in Los Angeles): 

"The jury system is fundamentally human, which is both a strength and a weakness. . . . Jurors are not automatons. They are imbued with human frailities as well as virtues. If the system is to function at all, we must tolerate a certain amount of imperfection short of actual bias. To demand theoretical perfection from every juror during the course of a trial is unrealistic."

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Thanks to ContractsProf Blog for the following: 

In late June, the Missouri Court of Appeals addressed the legal enforceability of a program adopted by Hallmark requiring employees to arbitrate employment disputes. The court held that Hallmark's ADR program did not constitute a contract and that there was no consideration to bind the employees to the promise to arbitrate claims.

The employer's arguments in favor of enforcement in this case were very much like those argued by O'Melveny & Myers here in California with the same result in the Ninth Circuit  --  the employee was not bound by an agreement by continuing to work after all employees were notified that their continued work for the company would constitute consent to being bound by the arbitration provision.

Check out the ContractsProf Blog analysis here.  We particularly like this comment by the Court:

The idea that an employer can create any legal contract it dares to create (based on a condition of at-will employment) cannot be sustained upon reflection. Imagine, for instance, an employer publishing a memo to employees stating that:

Anyone who continues to work for us through next Monday will be conclusively deemed to have agreed, as a condition of remaining in our employ through that date, that you will contribute twenty dollars per month over the next ten years to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), whether or not you remain employed here during that time. If you do not agree, you will need to resign your employment immediately, because by continuing to work, you are agreeing.

Yes, I did see the Beatles play the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, with an emphasis on SEE -- couldn't hear a thing!  Just a little nostalgia for my boomer readers.
 

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Today, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling in the long-awaited Simmons v. Ghaderi case about which I've commented on many occasions -- both on the importance of the confidentiality laws the Supreme Court held were air-tight today and on the process itself as a common example of a failed mediation proceeding.

Highlights from the opinion:

• "The Legislature chose to promote mediation by ensuring confidentiality rather than adopt a scheme to ensure good behavior in the mediation and litigation process."
• [T]he legislative history of the mediation confidentiality statutes as a whole reflects a desire that section 1115 et seq. be strictly followed in the interest of efficiency. By laying down clear rules, the Legislature intended to reduce litigation over the admissibility and disclosure of evidence regarding settlements and communications that occur during mediation. (citation omitted).  Allowing courts to craft judicial exceptions to the statutory rules would run counter to that intent."
• In Foxgate,  we reasoned we "were bound to respect the Legislature’s policy choice to protect mediation confidentiality rather than create a procedure that encouraged good faith participation in mediation. Thus, we held that evidence of a party’s bad faith during the mediation may not be admitted or considered." 

Here's the appellate decision that was reversed on nearly every ground raised in Justice Aldrich's compellingly well-reasoned dissent.

Here are our previous commentaries:

Take Steps to Ensure Mediation Agreements Can Be Enforced (co-authored by local arbitrator and mediator Deborah Rothman, first published in the Daily Journal)

You Say Waiver, I Say Estoppel, Let's Call the Whole Thing Wrong -- Another Look at Simmons v. Ghaderi  

If I Settle, It Will Mean that I Killed Her -- Anatomy of a Failed Medical Malpractice Mediation, at the National Institute for Advanced Conflict Resolution

Here's a veiw that opposes my own -- Kirk Pasich Replies:  the Mediation Privilege and Bad Faith Carrier Conduct.

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Sometimes it's better to skip the legal wrangling altogether and move directly to settlement options -- like purchasing puppy mills from negligent owners rather than asking the state to shut them down by way of a lawsuit.  

Not only do you avoid the high transaction costs of engaging the machinery of the legal system, you waste no time when time means continued suffering. 

Here's the New York Times article -- Wisconsin Anti-Pupply Mill Tactic -- reporting that the Wisconsin Humane Society took the fast track to end suffering by

buy[ing] and clos[ing] one of the nation’s largest dog-breeding facilities.

Cory Smith of the Humane Society of the United States says the effort may be the first time a chapter has dealt with the issue of so-called puppy mills by buying one of them. The Wisconsin society said it would find homes for the more than 1,100 dogs at the Puppy Haven Kennel in Markesan. An American Kennel Club spokeswoman, Daisy Okas, says the club suspended and fined the kennel’s owner in 2006 over the facility’s conditions.

Continue reading here.

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The quote below (though unduly harsh)  points to a problem we've had in the AmLaw 200 since most cases became too big to try. 

I'm coming back to this, promise. 

Now I'm just linking to John Wade's (as always brilliant) article -- Judicial Decision Making in Australia -- that quotes it.

“Because litigators rarely win or lose cases, they derive job satisfaction by recasting minor discovery disputes as titanic struggles. Younger lawyers, convinced that their future careers may hinge on how tough they seem while conducting discovery, may conclude that it is more important to look and sound ferocious than to act co-operatively, even if all that huffing and puffing does not help (and sometimes harms) their cases. While unpleasant at first, nastiness, like chewing tobacco, becomes a habit… Without guidance as to appropriate conduct from their elders, either at the firm or at the bench, it is easy for young lawyers not only to stay mired in contumacious, morally immature conduct, but to actually enjoy it.”  D Yablon, “Stupid Lawyer Tricks: An Essay on Discovery Abuse” (1996) 96 Columbia Law Rev 1618.

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DAILY JOURNAL NEWSWIRE ARTICLE
http://www.dailyjournal.com
© 2008 The Daily Journal Corporation.
All rights reserved.
-------------------------------------------

June 23, 2008

POPULAR ADR BLOGGER GETS SOME FACE TIME IN LOS ANGELES
By Greg Katz
Daily Journal Staff Writer 

SANTA MONICA - Nearly everybody in the Southern California mediation community knows the face of mediator Geoff Sharp but not too many have met him.

That's because the New Zealand-based mediator's scruffy mug sits atop his popular ADR blog, Mediator Blah ... Blah ..., at mediatorblahblah.blogspot.com.

Sitting down for coffee at a beachfront hotel with Los Angeles mediator and fellow ADR blogger Victoria Pynchon, Sharp said his blog is what got him his ticket for this trip to Southern California.

He was in town at the request of the Pepperdine University School of Law, giving a lecture at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution's annual summer dispute resolution conference last week.

"For someone like me to get to Pepperdine - why would you ask a farm boy like me?" Sharp said, laughing. "The blog's the only way that I talk to these people."

Sharp's witty and concise blog helps chart the course of the online mediation conversation. There are about 150 ADR blogs worldwide, according to one blogger, and many of them link back to Sharp's.

He blogs a potpourri of ADR links, anecdotes and opinions on a wide range of mediation topics, most of them relevant to both local and international audiences.

In one recent post, he chided some "lazy" neutrals who have given parties the impression that mediation is "a process where you show up at a downtown building but never speak to, or even meet, the room full of people with whom you have your problem and whose cooperation you require to solve it."

In another post, Sharp described a mediation in which a lawyer asked him to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle.

Sharp said he initially was worried that he couldn't do it.

"But I am pleased to report dear reader, that I was equal to the task," he wrote.

Sharp also broaches sensitive subjects, writing at length about how difficult it is for mediators to build their practices.

But whether the difficulties of mediation are financial or mathematical, he wouldn't think about going back to litigating.

In the late 1990s, Sharp left his litigation practice at Bell Gully, a large New Zealand law firm, to start mediating.

Sharp is now a member of the advanced mediation panels for both of New Zealand's widely recognized mediation training organizations, LEADR and the Arbitration and Mediation Institute of New Zealand.

He also is consulting with the International Mediation Institute on its proposed mediator qualifications standards. Mediator standards are a frequent subject of his blog posts, as well.

He said he relishes the freedom he gained from leaving a big firm, though mediating often proves lonely.

"If you ask why [mediators] blog, it's because we're so solitary," Sharp said.

Becoming an ADR blogger, he said, was like making friends "on the same block in a new town," even though most other bloggers are in other countries.

Sharp said that blogging about mediations, with their strict confidentiality rules, can be complicated.

At first, he would post about specific events in mediations, such as one lawyer who wore his Bluetooth headset throughout a mediation, even when he "went to the john," Sharp said.

Was it blinking?" Pynchon chimed in.

But now, with a wider audience, Sharp focuses on the more philosophical and legal issues in mediation. When he wants to tell a particular story, he embellishes the events that happened in mediation so no one feels their confidential conduct is being publicized.

"I haven't let the facts get in the way of a good story," says the disclaimer on his blog.

Pynchon, who writes the popular ADR blog Settle It Now, at negotiationlawblog.com, said that even when bloggers are careful, mediator blogs can disturb parties. One party recently came to Pynchon asking whether a post referred to that party's case.

It didn't.

Another post, about the California Supreme Court mediation confidentiality case, Simmons v. Ghaderi, provoked the defendant to call Pynchon personally.

"It's like having a cartoon character come to life," Pynchon said of being contacted by someone she only knew through reading briefs and opinions. Simmons v. Ghaderi, 143 Cal.App.4th 410 49 Cal.Rptr.3d 342 (2006).

But despite the occasional hassle, blogging has become a way of life for the two mediators.
"For me, blogging and dispute resolution rest on the same principles: collaboration and reciprocity," Pynchon said.

Sharp nodded his agreement.

"I don't do this profit," he said with a smile. "I do it for ego."

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Head's up insurance carriers and their counsel!

Noting the benefits of appellate mediation and the desirability of participants attending in person, a California appellate court warned insurers in Campagnone v. Enjoyable Pools & Spas that even the potential of coverage requires a representative with full settlement authority to attend court-ordered appellate mediations in person, unless excused in writing by the mediator. Further, the court warned parties and counsel that they may also face sanctions if they fail to notify insurers with potential coverage about appellate mediations. The court noted that California’s strict mediation confidentiality provisions prevent mediators from disclosing whether anyone fails to attend, but that an aggrieved party may do so in seeking sanctions from the court. The court withheld sanctions in this case only because no previous opinion had spelled out these requirements, even though the insurer was only liable for amounts in excess of $3 million and the judgment in the trial court was $2.4 million.

Campagnone v. Enjoyable Pools & Spas, No. C055050 (Cal. App.3d Dist., May 30, 2008)


Thanks to Keith Seat Mediation Newsletter for the case.

And thanks to arbitrator and mediator extraordinaire Deborah Rothman for passing this along to me.  (speaking of gender politics, Deborah graduated with the first class of women to be admitted to Yale University)

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O.K., the subject line was meant to shock you and to draw criticism for what I will admit is my greatest unresolved prejudicial default -- that white men over 65 who didn't participate in the  American cultural revolution of the late nineteen sixties and early 1970's did not and will never "get it." 

The Court opinion that triggered the headline and the recollections below is here.  The "executive summary" is as follows:  One of three arbitrators who cast the deciding vote on a plastic surgery malpractice case

• failed to disclose that he'd been censured while on the bench for making "sexually suggestive remarks to and asked sexually explicit questions of female staff members; referred to a staff member using crude and demeaning names and descriptions and an ethnic slur; referred to a fellow jurist’s physical attributes in a demeaning manner; and mailed a sexually suggestive postcard to a staff member addressed to her at the courthouse.” 
• The majority arbitrators deciding the malpractice case stated that the female claimant was not credible because the "severity of the symptoms to which she testified went beyond what she described to her doctors, adding, “This claimant has had five prior facial surgeries.”
• Similarly, in summarizing the claimant's expert’s testimony, these arbitrators noted, “One thing probably everyone can agree upon, after five facial surgeries, [claimant] could have done without a sixth one.”

Back to My Own History as Descriptive of --  But No Excuse for -- My Own Biases

We all have biases that we hide from others and some that we successfully hide from ourselves.  

We live, I'm told, in a 200 year present.  That means that my early life affects your life today.  After all, I'm an old white woman, about whom you may well have biases.  If I sit on your arbitration panel, you're going to want to understand those biases.  That's why I'm giving you a bullet-pointed history of what the world was like when I was forming my essential character at 17 years of age in 1969.

• the "want-ads" in the classified section of every major newspaper in American were categorized by gender -- "help wanted - women" and "help wanted - men"
• in my senior year in high school, my entire class took "preference aptitude" tests to give us an idea of what our future careers might look like -- the girls were given "pink" tests and the boys "blue" tests -- had I shown an aptitude for, say, math (and no I didn't) I would have been steered into nursing; my male friends into "medicine" as physicians.
• women were subject of explicit ridicule in magazine and newspaper cartoons -- we were airheads, bimbos, bad drivers, harpies or -- the "new" stereotype -- communist-longhair-folk-singing-America-hating-hippie-riot-inciting-"girls" who were alternately "men hating" or -- an old phrase -- "of easy virtue."

• it wasn't until the 1970's, when I was in college and already planning a career teaching English (after all, nursing required math-skills) that the idea of a career in the law for women as anything other than a secretary began to seem possible.
  • at Columbia Law School, the 1970 graduating class was only 8% female
  • by the year I graduated from law school in 1980, Columbia's female population had grown to a whopping 32%
  • although the enrollment of women in my law school class at U.C. Davis was nearly 50% in 1980, when I told my beloved mother in 1976 that I was going to apply to law school she said "why do that, honey?  Be a legal secretary, then you can marry a lawyer."
  • when my husband attended Yale Law School ('67-'70) he had seven women classmates
  • until the late sixties and early seventies, a woman desirous of an Ivy League university education had no choice but to go to a "woman's" school -- Barnard, Radcliff and the like.
• when I was in high school
  • abortion was illegal
  • married women were not entitled to their own credit cards
  • gender discrimination was both de jure and de facto -- it was o.k. to refuse to hire, sell to, rent to, deny membership to, etc. -- women
• when I  was practicing law (these all from the early '80s)
  • a partner for whom I worked told me that women weren't permitted at the local "men's only" club because "we don't want our wives there."
  • a Judge required me to identify myself as Mrs. or Miss and when I said I didn't think it necessary to identify myself by my marital status, asked "what are you some kind of [women's] libber?" (yes, I lost the motion)
  • I was advised by the few women attorneys senior to me not to get pregnant until after I made partner
  • secretaries were allowed to refuse to be assigned to a woman attorney
  • the first woman to make partner at my law firm was quite openly referred to as "the first muff partner" by her colleagues 
  • on the other hand, when a client said (of my assignment to its case) that the company did not want to be represented by a "girl," my partner told the client "then you don't want this firm representing you because she's the best associate I have"

I promise to work on my prejudices.  And I advise anyone who is about to appear before any dispute resolver -- be that person male, female, white, black, young or old, GOOGLE THEM FIRST!

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In Shanks v. Swift Transportation, the Federal District Court  for the Southern District of Texas held that where plaintiff-heirs in a wrongful death action sought survival and death benefits under a benefits plan requiring the arbitration of decedent's claims, Texas law required that those claims be arbitrated under the employment agreement's requirements despite the fact that none of plaintiffs was a signatory to the arbitration agreement.

Among the principles and holdings in this case were:

• the Federal Arbitration Act did not apply by its own terms
• although Texas law does not presume arbitration agreements are valid, if they are valid, doubts regarding their scope are resolved in favor of arbitration. 
•  under Texas law non-signatories may be bound to arbitration agreements under the doctrines of:
  • incorporation by reference;
  • assumption;
  • agency;
  • alter ego;
  • equitable estoppel; and
  • third-party beneficiary
• the heirs' survival claim and the claim for death benefits brought pursuant to the
  Plan was required to be arbitrated under the doctrine of direct benefits estoppel.
• Because Plaintiffs’ wrongful death claims were “factually intertwined” with the survival and death benefits claims, they must be arbitrated alongside the other claims.

I do not know whether Texas law, like California law, requires employers to foot the bill for the arbitration.  If it does not, I wonder whether this decision is the death-knell to the Plaintiffs' wrongful death claims, claims that can usually be pursued only if the attorney advances the costs of the wrongful death action to the Plaintiffs.  (Seethe ABA Journal post Are Lawyers Becoming Luxury Goods?) */

I also wonder whether the Fifth Circuit would conclude that requiring the arbitration of a wrongful death claim contravenes public policy.  I'd certainly make that argument before a federal trial court sitting in California, though I doubt that this ruling would be possible under California law.  

Hat tip to Lawyers USA for bringing us this breaking legal news.

_________________________

*/   As the ABA Journal item notes:

Lawyers increasingly are becoming like luxury goods to many would-be clients, an expensive article that they can't afford or don't want to make a priority.

And that is bad news for the profession as well as for the public, says a recent article in the National (PDF), a magazine published by the Canadian Bar Association

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A tremendous effort accomplished today by Blawg Review # 167 at E-Commerce Law, bringing us at least one post from blogs in all 50 states organized by the date of their entry into the union.  Blogger Jonathan Frieden must have devoted much of any lawyer's cherished 3-day week-end to this effort, for which all legal bloggers should give him a hearty round of applause.

On the ADR front,  Jonathan gives us Oregon, admitted on February 14 (how very Oregonian) 1859 and The National Arbitration Forum Blog entry  Americans Increasingly Denied Access to Justice.  Here's the attention-grabbing lede.  Click on the link for the full post.

The latest California Bar Journal contains an alarming and attention-grabbing piece from the Bar President. In The neglected middle class, Jeff Bleich explained how hard it has become for the hardworking American to get their day in court.

"[O]ur legal system is increasingly serving only the wealthiest interests or the very poorest ones: those who have great resources and those who are lucky enough to get help through legal aid, despite the serious underfunding of that system."

And while we're thinking of the flag and all things  patriotic, here are a few random links on patriotism and justice.

Obama and the Flag (pin) from the Los Angeles Times.

Patriotism, Irony and Liberty from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.

Truth, Justice and the American Way from the Long View

Patriotism:  Not Just for Lapels at Abundance of Absurdities

Patriotism and Michelle Obama: A 4th of July Reflection from Anne-Marie Slaughter (Huffington Post)

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Gini Nelson of Engaging Conflicts ran a six-part series recently on "Adding Cooperative Practice to the ADR Toolkit."  Her final part in this series -- linked supra -- is the final entry of Guest Blogger Law Professor John Lande’s posts.  Linked here is his article The Promise and Perils of Collaborative Law -- which is also linked in Gini's blog with her comments here.

Before you run over to Gini's site to read Lande's excellent post or his great article, I'd like to simply bullet-point some observations based upon my four-years of full-time mediation and arbitration practice.

• when I co-arbitrate with some of the best commercial arbitrators in the business -- these are Ivy League lawyers with many decades of experience representing Fortune 50 Companies in AmLaw 100 Law Firms, the ultimate decision changes many times during the course of deliberations and almost always could go either way.
• having spent a considerable time in the Los Angeles Complex Court as an experienced commercial litigator "externing" for credit to earn my LL.M in '06, I can tell you that the deliberations in chambers of these highly respected jurists is not much different that those in which I have engaged when sitting on an arbitration panel

The take away?  No matter who is hearing your case, your chances of winning are 50-50.  Flip a coin.  Think this doesn't apply to you?  I have arbitrated cases being handled by the top ten law firms in the country.  I have seen those same type of firms litigate and try cases in the Complex Court.  It's 50-50 friends.

Below -- observations on how you and your mediator can be "happy together."  (And the Turtles from 1967 so that you can have a little musical accompaniment to this post) 

Observations of End-Game Litigation from a Mediator's and Settlement Consultant's Perspective.

Despite years of inquiry and the review of millions of documents, sophisticated parties (Fortune 50) represented by dynamite law firms (AmLaw 50) haven't yet learned the most fundamental information about the following matters -- most of which are more important to the settlement of the case than the cost-detriment-benefit-position-driven-chance-of-victory settlement posture:

• what are the hidden interests that your opponent must satisfy before accepting a settlement that is below the number he once told his client should never under any circumstances be accepted?
• what are the hidden constraints upon your opponent's authority that must be removed before he can pay more money than he once told his client should never under any circumstances be paid?
• why was this litigation initiated in the first instance?
• who gave the litigation the "green light"?
• what are the probable consequences to the continued financial security of the person who gave the litigation the "green light" in the first place or who has authorized the defense bills for the last 5, 10, or 15 years?
• is the person who green-lighted the litigation in the first place still employed by your client?
• what are the probable consequences to the financial well-being of the corporation who must pay more than it wishes to pay or accept less than it wishes to recover?
• Who is the most frightened person in the room, i.e., whose hide might be sacrificed if the litigation settles for more/less than predicted, or, often worse, actually goes to trial.

There are so many of these settlement-driving and -inhibiting questions that only my own personal time contraints -- I must start my day's work -- make me stop listing them.  

Let me conclude with this however.  Never underestimate your client's reluctance to settle the case on terms that seem unjust to it.  This is the most important function a mediator can play on the day of settlement -- explaining justice issues to the clients and helping the clients de-demonize their opponent -- which occurs most easily in JOINT SESSION yet which most litigators would rather have their teeth drilled than attend.

O.K. I can't conclude without saying this.  If you have the courage to try a case, you possess the cajones to participate in at least one joint session to help the parties come to terms with the justice issues -- which are often driven by the conclusion, affirmed over and over again in the course of the litigation, that their opponent is an evil, mendacious, grasping, greedy, malicious, duplicious lying liar with his pants on fire.  

This is almost never true.  The parties on both sides almost always possess equal parts of good and bad, just like the rest of us. 

Let your parties re-adjust their perception of "the enemy" in joint session.  I can almost guarantee you that a conversation will ensue in which the parties spontaneously tell each other what interests they really need to satisfy to settle and what constraints they are really working under.  And I don't guarantee a lot of things. 

Why can't I do this for the parties?

Because often neither side will disclose these matters to me because they don't trust that I won't use that information to help settle the case and because the parties won't believe what I say about their opposition in the first place (obviously, they've pulled the wool over my eyes). 

"How do you know he's not lying?"  is a question mediators are asked on a regular basis.  My answer is "I have no idea."  But if you let your client talk to the opposition -- with any constraints, restrictions and control you wish to retain -- which I can orchestrate for you -- your client will be able to elicit the details that give any story a ring of truth (or falsity) while at the same time watching the body language that constitutes between 60 and 80% of all communication.

Would you try a case without 80% of the information you need?  Of course not!  And yet you're content to avoid a joint session when that session could provide you with between 60 and 80% more information than you had when you arrived on the morning of the mediation or settlement conference?

Suspend your disbelief in the mediator ("who-will-do-anything-to-settle-the-case") for just a couple of minutes.  Remember that we're in possession of confidential information we cannot divulge to you.  

Take our lead.  And if you don't trust us to do so, for heaven's sake find a mediator you can trust!

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There is no principle I hold more dear than the rule of law.  I've written before about some critics' contention that our own government has turned away from the rule of law here.  Some of those  critics go so far as to accuse our government of waging war on the rule of law -- calling its strategy "lawfare."

I've also written before about critcisms levelled against ADR practices as threats to the principle that all men, women, and institutions will be judged by the same gender-blind, color-blind, nationality-blind, disability-blind (etc.) rules of law. 

There are those who believe that mediation -- which is practiced without rules, best practices or even a common theoretical basis --  permits mediators -- who are primarily over-40 white men -- to unfairly pressure litigants to settle their lawsuits against their better judgment.  There are further charges that mediation re-injects favortism and prejudice back into a system that spent most of the latter half of the 20th century ridding itself of.  

I take these criticisms very very seriously, repeating throughout any mediation session my opening assertion that my role is to present the parties with choices and to faciliate a settlement if they believe it may be better alternative to continued litigation, not to hustle them away from their right to a jury trial.  

I would be far more successful in being "neutral" about proceeding to a jury trial if there were an easier, less costly, and speedier way to bring a dispute before a jury.  We have, lamentably, permitted our cherished rule of law to become so procedurally encrusted that it sometimes seems like no option at all -- at least not an option available to all but the wealthy or those represented by lawyers willing to accept a contingent fee.

All of this troubles me.  I invite comment at the same time that I provide the thoughts of some of our greatest statesmen and jurists about the right to trial by jury.      

George Washington

"There was not a member of the Constitutional Convention who had the least objection to what is contended for by the advocates for a Bill of Rights and trial by jury." (1788)

John Adams 

"Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty. Without them we have no other fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle and fed and clothed like swine and hounds." (1774)

Thomas Jefferson 

"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." (1788)

"Trial by jury is part of that bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation." (1801)

"The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes has been devoted to the attainment of trial by jury. It should be the creed of our political faith." (1801)

James Madison 
"Trial by jury in civil cases is as essential to secure the liberty of the people as any one of the pre-existent rights of nature." (1789)

John Quincy Adams 

"The struggle for American independence was for chartered rights, for English liberties, for trial by jury, habeas corpus and Magna Carta." (1839)

Patrick Henry of Virginia [Patriot who said "Give me liberty or give me death!"]
"Trial by jury is the best appendage of freedom by which our ancestors have secured their lives and property. I hope we shall never be induced to part with that excellent mode of trial." (1788)

Alexander Hamilton 

"The friends and adversaries of the plan of the convention, if they agree in nothing else, concur at least in the value they set upon the trial by jury; the former regard it as a valuable safeguard to liberty; the latter represent it as the very palladium of free government." (1788)

Daniel Webster

"The protection of life and property, habeas corpus, trial by jury, the right of an open trial, these are principles of public liberty existing in the best form in the republican institutions of this country." (1848)

Judge Stephen Reinhardt 

"Our constitutional right to trial by jury does not turn on the political mood of the moment, the outcome of cost/benefit analyses or the results of economic or fiscal calculations. There is no price tag on the continued existence of the civil jury system, or any other constitutionally-provided right." (1986)

David Hume 

"Trial by jury is the best institution calculated for the preservation of liberty and the administration of justice that was ever devised by the wit of man." (1762)

Judge William Bryant [First African-American federal district court judge in D.C]

"If it weren't for lawyers, I'd still be three-fifths of a man." (2004)

Justice William O. Douglas

"The Massachusetts Body of Liberties was a new Magna Carta. It contained many of the seeds of the civil liberties which today distinguish us from the totalitarian systems, including the right to trial by jury." (1954)

Justice Hugo Black

"Our duty to preserve the Seventh Amendment is a matter of high Constitutional importance. The founders of our country thought that trial by civil jury was an essential bulwark of civil liberty and it must be scrupulously safeguarded." (1939, 1943)

Justice Ward Hunt

"Twelve jurors know more of the common affairs of life than does one man, and they can draw wiser and safer conclusions than a single judge." (1873)

Quotations excerpted from In Defense of Trial by Jury: Vols. I and II by the American Jury Trial Foundation (1993) and copied verbatim and in their entirety from the web site of the American Association of Justice (i.e., the American Trial Lawyers Association).

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You know, I've been reading the Daily Journal my entire legal career.  I never gave much thought to the men and women whose job it is to report the daily legal news.  Now I have.

There's a reporter at the DJ named Noah Barron who not only reported my dad's passing, but talked on the telephone with me for more than an hour at a time when I really needed to talk about my dad to someone who makes his living being curious about people's personal lives.  It made a huge difference in my experience of my father's passing.

You see.  We make these differences in one another's lives all the time.  We just usually fail to acknowledge one another for it. 

So I want to thank Noah for the article carrying his by-line published in the DJ today.  

And I want to thank Dad for following his own best advice from our river rafting adventures:  keep your oar in the water (for balance) and paddle through your fear.  I would never have had the courage to go to law school were it not for the example he set -- which you can read about in Noah's fine article below. 

DAILY JOURNAL NEWSWIRE ARTICLE
© 2008 The Daily Journal Corporation.
All rights reserved.
-------------------------------------------

June 17, 2008

JURIST FOUGHT FOR GAY RIGHTS BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR
By Noah Barron
Daily Journal Staff Writer
This article appears on Page 2

LOS ANGELES - Superior Court Commissioner Donald W. Pike was a self-made millionaire, a self-taught thinker who went to law school but never college, an adventurer and a legal pioneer who broke ground on gay marriage rights three decades before it was fashionable. He died in his Los Angeles home on his 84th birthday on June 9 from complications from Parkinson's disease.

Back in 1982, the Daily Journal profiled Pike, setting down in print many of the stories that came to form the man: his impoverished beginnings in Nebraska, the fifth of nine children, his family's "Grapes of Wrath"-esque exodus to California and his early jobs as a child of 14 working as a farm laborer.

Before he was appointed commissioner to the Los Angeles County Superior Court bench, he was a milkman, an insurance salesman, a merchant marine in World War II and a lawyer, and then in his 60s became a millionaire through his real estate investments.

"I am ridiculously proud of my father," Pike's daughter, Victoria Pike Pynchon, said. "He took every opportunity to improve his station in life and improve the future of his children. But he didn't accomplish these things alone. No one does."

Pike's marriage collapsed in 1962 and he moved from Los Angeles to Sacramento to start a new life.

Later, presiding over domestic cases in Los Angeles, he would say that his failed marriage gave him special insight into family woes.

"Having had two marriages helps me understand family law," he said in a 1982 Daily Journal profile.

Pynchon said she was deeply hurt when Pike left home but reconnected with him as an adult, becoming a lawyer herself and watching him on the bench. She said he sometimes grew emotional during custody battles.

"He would call a recess whenever he was going to burst into tears," she said. In describing his leaving his family, Pike said, "I was terribly guilty."

Pike was 35 before he earned his high school equivalency. When he set out to start over in his 30s, he visited a a psychologist whose IQ test told him for the first time that he was intelligent.

"I thought the rich were smart and the poor were dumb," he said in a 1982 interview.

"He lived in fear of poverty," his daughter said.

Pike wasted no time, passing a college equivalency test offered by the State Bar and then attending McGeorge School of Law by night while delivering Dad's Root Beer by day, sending support checks home all the while. He passed the Bar Exam on his first attempt.

Gary Pike, the commissioner's nephew, said that while Pike was practicing civil law, he drafted contracts for gay men and women that emulated the rights of married couples.

The work reflected a legal sensibility decades ahead of its time, Gary Pike said.

Retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Eli Chernow worked with Pike when Pike was a commissioner, from 1973 to the mid-1990s.

"He was a good friend and great colleague. He left a big hole when he left the bench," Chernow said.

Pike is survived by his wife, Juanita; his two daughters Sharon Lawrence and Victoria Pynchon; and two grandchildren. Four of his nine siblings are still alive, Oscar, Lois, Dorothy and Kenneth Pike.

Private memorial services will be held in Pynchon's Los Angeles home. Instead of flowers, the family asks donations be made in Pike's memory to the Alliance for Children's Rights at http://www.kids-alliance.org

noah_barron@dailyjournal.com

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Lexis-Nexis isn't just about legal research anymore.  L-N is posting a broad array of practice development materials for new lawyers at its New Attorney Hub site here.  And you don't have to be an L-N subscriber to benefit.  All of the materials provided are free.

Though there aren't yet a lot of ADR skill development materials at Hub, I'm proud to say that they've included my posts Ten Settlement Conference/Mediation Traps for the Unwary and On the Job Deposition Training with their other Skill Building Materials. 

You can find Professional Skills, Practice Area Skills and Research and Writing Skills there.

The editors of these materials are combing the internet to provide the most up-to-date materials from some of the oldest hands in the business.  They contacted me, after all, and the one thing I do know myself is that I'm an old --- er, make that experienced -- litigator.

If the Lexis-Nexis people are tracking mentions of their Hub site in the blogosphere, I refer them to my link page here for additional materials -- particularly those included in the blogs listed in the ADR and Intellectual Property sections on that page.

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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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Is your litigation particularly contentious? 

Take a page from theBarbie- Bratz litigation which the AmLaw Daily reports was partially settled with the assistance of Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues in the Bush administration. 

(Photo from the San Diego Union Tribune article Doll Wars)

The AmLaw Daily reports that Prosper was "brought into the case by federal district court Judge Stephen Larson to oversee settlement negotiations among all three parties because (according to Prosper) the "judge and the parties thought [his] international experience mediating and negotiating armed conflicts would translate here."  See Barbie and Bratz Head to Trial here (emphasis mine).  

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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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Thanks to Geoff Sharp over at mediator blah blah for citing us to Justice Trumps Peace: the Enduring Relevance of Owen Fiss’s Against Settlement by Don Ellinghausen, Jr.  Geoff Sharp's excellent post on the issues raised (again) is here and Ellinghusen's exhaustive treatment of mediation's limitations and overblown claims here.

Agree with Fiss, Ellinghausen, Laura Nader and Carrie Menkel-Meadow or not, there shouldn't be a mediator practicing who is unaware of these serious criticisms of the mediation process.  If we're not aware of them, we can't avoid the potential for "muscle" mediation to prevent even the aspirational goal of delivering justice without regard to gender, color, power, social status, wealth and all the rest of the social markers the law has been so careful to avoid paying obeisance to.

Check it out.

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I've blogged several times about bullying, both here and over at the IP ADR Blog.  We learned from Forbes.com today that federal prosecutors are seeking an indictment against the mom we wrote about here for her alleged role in an online hoax that caused a 13-year old girl to commit suicide.  Here's the link with an excerpt below:  Indictment sought in MySpace cyberbullying case.

LOS ANGELES - Federal prosecutors are seeking an indictment against a Missouri mother for her alleged role in an online hoax played on a 13-year-old girl who committed suicide.

Two law enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was going to be announced shortly Thursday, told The Associated Press they are seeking four charges against Lori Drew, whose daughter was feuding with the victim.

Drew allegedly helped create a false MySpace account to contact Megan Meier who thought she was talking with a 16-year-old boy named "Josh Evans." Megan hanged herself in October 2006.

Drew has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan.

See also Wired's warning that the basis for the indictment is shaky at best.  Below:

[T]he U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles [is] charging Drew with "unauthorized access" to MySpace's computers, for allegedly violating the site's terms of service.

MySpace's user agreement requires registrants, among other things, to provide factual information about themselves and to refrain from soliciting personal information from minors or using information obtained from MySpace services to harass or harm other people. By allegedly violating that click-to-agree contract, Drew committed the same crime as any hacker. .  . .

In a statement, MySpace says it supports the prosecution. "MySpace does not tolerate cyberbullying and is cooperating fully with the U.S. attorney in this matter," a company spokeswoman said. The company declined to say what the precedent would mean for otherwise innocent users who, for example, misstate their age or ZIP code when setting up their MySpace profiles.

"Theoretically, it applies to any use of a service in violation of the terms of service," says EFF's Granick, who says the impact of the Drew prosecution could be far-reaching. . . .

Matwyshyn says the Drew case is an especially creative use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, given that the aggrieved party in this case is not really MySpace, the putative victim, but Meier.

The case is being prosecuted only because there is so much pressure to see justice done in the Meier tragedy, but existing law doesn't provide an immediate solution, she says.

Matwyshyn says she understands the impulse, but is concerned that if successfully prosecuted the case could set a bad precedent for turning breach-of-contract civil cases into criminal ones.

"Terms of use have been progressively getting more Draconian and restrictive," she notes. "So as these provisions get drafted and users agree to them, we may find ourselves in a situation where a company that drafts one may try to leverage this kind of case law to take a breach-of-contract action and turn it into a computer-intrusion [case]."

Granick agrees. "The real problem is that something tragic happened, but the harm that occurred doesn't have anything to do with the way they've charged the offense," she says. . . 

"When asked if this is the kind of case Granick would want to litigate, she said, "If [Drew] calls me I'd be very interested in talking with her about this case. I think there is such an extreme reading here, and I do think it's dangerously flawed for other cases. I think it's scary and it's wrong and something should be done about it."

As the saying goes, hard facts make bad laws.  Why not a civil suit for intentional infliction of emotional distress?  Or a prosecution for the crime of impersonation to cause injury or commit fraud?

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Brilliant piece on de-escalating conflict over at Tammy Lenski's Conflict Zen this morning.  Teaser and link below:  

The friendly bailiff unlocked the small courtroom. After telling me to make myself at home, he pointed to a small red button on the wall. “If you need me, just press that button and I’ll be in here faster than you can blink and eye. It’s an emergency button.”

“Ok, thanks,” I replied, and began to unpack my briefcase.

“I mean it,” he said. “Just press the button. Maybe you should set up your chair so you’re near it.”

I gave him a long look. “You seem to want me to know about that button. Is there something else you want to tell me?”

Continue reading here.

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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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Thanks to Geoff Sharp at mediator blah blah for alerting us to this truly excellent post over at The Consensus Building Institute:  Mediator as Juror:  A Day in Middlesex County Superior Court.  After recounting the facts of the case, CBI's Managing Director Patrick Field comments as follows:

[T]he case reminded me why mediators have such an important, but difficult, job in supporting justice, civil society and social capital. Many parties simply cannot find a way out of escalating conflict and assume that justice can only be served in the courts. This case was a perfect example of several time-tested conflict lessons.

Emotions get the better of us. Here were two well-educated, well-off individuals who let their anger, hurt, offense, and desire for revenge get the best of them.

Communicating is the hardest thing to do. A second phone call, an attempt to be conciliatory, or a short email asking to set a different tone didn’t happen. Somehow, the simplest thing to do—talk—became the hardest.

Sunk costs sink us further. Clearly, the plaintiff was trying to recover his sunk costs, but had passed the point of no return. From an economic standpoint, he had failed to get out when it made dollars and sense (pun intended) and was embarrassingly digging himself deeper and deeper.

Taking responsibility is harder than fighting over it. The facts, as we came to understand them, suggested that this dispute could and should have been resolved months earlier—to everyone’s benefit. Yet the parties chose to point fingers and relinquish their responsibility for resolving the dispute efficiently, fairly, and expeditiously.

Justice is sought but not necessarily served. The parties, both angry, both determined that they were right, decided to take their case all the way to jury. Each was going to get a verdict in his favor one way or another! But the reality was that several partial settlements were offered, winnowing the total amount down, and the judge retained the right to rule on legal fees. We, the jury, were left with a seemingly trivial case, wishing we could punish them both for being so foolhardy.

Serving on a jury reaffirmed to me that justice doesn’t simply emanate Solomon-style from on high. Here’s what I learned.

Justice is not divined; it is negotiated. As our jury deliberated, I realized that this was in fact a negotiation, constrained as it might be by our charge and the evidence. Was the contract valid? Did the defendant actually breach the contract? If so, how much were the damages really worth? When parties hand over their dispute to a jury, they are not avoiding a serious negotiation, they are simply leaving it in the hands of strangers.

Justice is blind. As jurors, we couldn’t ask questions. We couldn’t get at the parties’ deeper motivations, feelings, and emotions (like a mediator might). We did issue a verdict, but we did so blindly, due to our exceedingly limited information and understanding.

Juries deliver verdicts, not necessarily justice. I feel our verdict was fair and reasonable, given what we knew. My fellow jurors (all twelve) took the case seriously, considered the evidence, and did their best to arrive at logical conclusions.

However, we probably didn’t deliver much on the larger front of justice. We couldn’t help the parties find a resolution that left them better off in terms of lower costs, less bitterness, and greater self-respect. We couldn’t censure the lawyers for not doing a better job of restraining their clients’ emotions. We couldn’t issue an admonition against abusing the courts with cases that should be settled by reasonable people elsewhere. We couldn’t aid society by helping its citizens take responsibility for their actions, emotions, and disputes.

So, mediators, next time you sit with parties who are rearing to go to court, I encourage you to keep in mind that court is really settlement, formal as it may be, by other means. And to the future parties of such a suit, it would be well to remember that there is no certainty—and in fact much reason to doubt—that a judge and jury will issue a better verdict or clearer justice than you might arrive at by your own making.

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See Lawyers USA News Brief Employees may be at disadvantage in arbitration  by Correy E. Stephenson here.  Excerpt below.

State courts are reversing arbitration awards for employees at a "statistically significant" rate compared to reversing employer-friendly awards, according to a new study.

Professor Michael LeRoy of the University of Illinois College of Law, a professor of labor and employment, recently released his findings after analyzing arbitration awards from an appellate perspective.

The study, published as a paper, "Do Courts Create Moral Hazard? When Judges Nullify Employer Liability in Arbitrations: An Empirical Analysis," looked at 443 state and federal court rulings on arbitration awards from 1975 to 2007.

While federal courts upheld 85.7 percent of employer wins and 85 percent of awards for employees, LeRoy found markedly different results in the state court system.

There, lower level appellate courts affirmed employer awards 87.2 percent and employee wins 77.6 percent of the time, while the upper appellate courts were even more divergent, with 86.7 percent of employer awards affirmed and only 56.4 percent of employee victories upheld.

These findings suggest a "snowballing futility for employees," LeRoy writes, because the options after being reversed on appeal are limited. Either the employee must start over at the beginning of arbitration, "or worse, be stuck with a useless award and no other recourse."

LeRoy terms this trend a "moral hazard" which is "created by risk sharing contracts or public policies that discourage individuals from avoiding costly behaviors."

Continue reading here.

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Here's a local community protest being "handled" -- in part -- as a community-wide  "mediation," "facilitation,"  or "public dialog."

We have an attempted engagement here over the apparently unwanted "gift" of a new Home Depot in the Sunland-Tujunga community.  It appears that the community would like to see an Environmental Impact Assessment conducted and an EIR filed before the Depot moves in (if ever).

The City Attorney stepped in to help -- recruiting community mediators and facilitators to conduct a community dialog.  It's my understanding that Home Depot representatives were not present at this dialog (please correct me if I'm wrong about this).  For that reason alone -- a missing critical stakeholder -- a suspicious or hostile community response is unsurprising. 

Let me say, however, that we/** are new at this -- making an effort to engage an entire community in a facilitated conversation about the issues giving rise to a protest.  We're bound to make the type of errors highlighted by community members below.  So let's not call this a failure but an opportunity to learn.  

Here, for instance, is a recent blog entry calling the "community meeting" a facilitation rather than a mediation -- correctly noting that mediators have no allegiance to one side or the other and no agenda.  See the Zuma Times -- LA Daily Blog coverage with one or more YouTube videos here.

For background, here's a late April '08 Los Angeles Daily News article on the issue -- excerpt below.  

SUNLAND - Amid a contentious battle over a proposed Home Depot, city officials tried to cool tempers Saturday by hosting a community dialog aimed at finding a middle ground between warring factions.

About 200 community residents attended, although organizers had been expecting up to 1,000.

Although a few supporters, including Home Depot employees, noted the project would likely bring more jobs to the community, most in the crowd were against it.

Asked for opinions, most listed complaints such as traffic and an increase in day laborers. Some even used the term "community assassination." . . . .

Some residents sat and listened patiently as mediators engaged them in dialog in an effort to understand their concerns and to work toward constructive solutions.

Billed as "the Sunland/Tujunga dialog," the meeting at Mount Gleason Middle School was set up by the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office as part of an agreement with The Home Depot Inc., which suspended a $10 million lawsuit against the city while it seeks a building permit.

The company is seeking to build a store on the old Kmart lot on Foothill Boulevard . . . 

Attorney Barbara Goldfarb, a volunteer facilitator with the dispute-resolution team that conducted the meeting, made sure everyone knew that she and her staff had no connection to the home-improvement company.

"I do not have a Home Depot credit card," she said before people split up into 27 groups. "I do not own Home Depot stock."

Goldfarb said the dispute-resolution program is funded by grants and funds from the city and county.

"Certain times (these types of efforts) don't work. Other times, they work out wonderfully," Goldfarb said.

"There's always an answer to conflict if people will talk."

And here's a mis-step "we" won't make next time as reported by the Sunland-Tujunga Alliance blog.  

Lots of folks have comments and questions about the evaluation form we were asked to fill out at the end of the small groups. I have some of my own, too. I was shocked and horrified at some of those questions. I thought the questions showed a slanted, pre-conceived idea of what someone thought our issues should or would be, not what our concerns really are. I spoke with Barbara Goldfarb, the lead facilitator, about it. Yep, the evaluation form was written by the RAND Corporation, just as the pre-questions were. Ms. Goldfarb agreed with me that some of those questions were way off the mark, too complex to be answered by just checking a box, or unrelated to our actual concerns.

I just want to add that I am so proud of us, all of us who showed up yesterday. We were well prepared, and participated with a mature and honest approach. Also, to those who wrote intelligent, well thought out answers to the questions, I applaud you. There were a lot of people who let us know that they were unable to attend the “dialog” due to other commitments, but those of us who were there, carried the message loud and clear! No Home Depot in Sunland-Tujunga! Home Depot must follow the rules! We want our EIR!

I invite comment from participants in the community. For their information, I am not affiliated with the City of Los Angeles in any way.  I serve as a volunteer mediator for the Los Angeles County Bar Association Community Mediation program in West Hollywood, on the Los Angeles Superior Court's pro bono mediation panel (for litigated cases) and as a Settlement Officer for the local federal trial court (also for litigated cases).  Otherwise, my work is entirely in the private sector. 

___________________

/**  When I say "we" I'm referring to mediators in general who are part of a theory and practice of facilitated dialog as well as many other strands of the mediation movement including consensus-building, prejudice-reduction, settlement conferences, mediations of litigated cases, community mediation, restorative justice and the like.  I personally have had nothing to do with the community "dialog" or facilitation or "mediation" arising from the dispute over the development of a Home Depot in Sunland-Tujunga.

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. . . because the jury is about to transform your $1.7 million commercial dispute into $352.7 million verdict . . .  read all about it in this 2001 story, After $1.7 million landed in the wrong account, CoreStates insisted it could seize the money. It was A VERY COSTLY MOVE.

I give you only the article's conclusion, daring you to click on it without reading it to the end.

The overarching question of why the bank didn’t settle remains a puzzle.[The Bank's counsel] thought he gave the bank solid advice. All the lawyers who joined in the bank’s defense hold to that position: Legally, they contend, the bank was within its rights in seizing the $1.7 million.

But the case ran away from them. It got bigger and bigger and worse and worse. And there was no stopping it. One defense lawyer observed, “It went to hell in a handbasket.”

Maurice Mitts says his client is willing to call it quits for the $56 million. But First Union still isn’t willing to pay a big number. Mitts isn’t surprised.

“ ‘We know the law, we are the law, and too bad for you,’ ” Mitts said. “That’s been their attitude all along.”

Thanks to the Philadelphia law firm of Mitts Milavec, LLC for fighting the good fight and posting this dynamite legal tale.

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If you aren't using writs of attachment in contract cases where the amount due is certain, you aren't using the most powerful means of increasing your bargaining power in litigation.

Attend LACBA's Brown Bag Lunch with Judge James Chalfant at the Stanley Mosk Courthouse 111 N. Hill Street, Los Angeles on May 15, 2008.  Program Description:

Writs and Receivers: Practice tips for those who are rarely there. Judge James Chalfant will host a brown bag lunch highlighting tips and tricks for those who may not have much experience in this area. There is no cost to attend, but participation is limited to the first 12 attorneys who register. The program will be held in the judge's chambers at Stanley Mosk Courthouse, Dept 85. Please note, there is no CLE credit for this program.

Click here to register online.

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Thanks to Stephanie West Allen at idealawg (channeled to me this morning via the Forbes Business and Financial Blog Network) for the Famous Trials Website from Socrates to Moussaoui (and yes of course O.J.'s there). 

(above, theDeath of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David)

Here's Stephanie's announcement:

Professor Douglas O. Linder of University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law has created a Web site Famous Trials which presents one intriguing story after another. From Professor Linder's faculty page:

The Famous Trials website, the Web's largest and most visited collection of original essays, images, and primary documents pertaining to great trials, has been an ongoing project of Professor Linder's since 1996. Professor Linder has contributed book chapters, participated in video projects, and presented public speeches on the subject of historic trials.

BATNA for the uninitiated simply means a Better (or the Best) Alternative to a Negotiated Resolution, which is what trial is when your opponent can't negotiate a settlement within the range of reason.

Check it out!

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I promised you a series of posts on mediating complex and sophisticated commercial mediation. 

Here's what I'm really most interested in doing -- starting a high level conversation among commercial litigators and commercial mediators about the best way in which we can help one another help your clients to achieve the best resolution possible to their commercial dispute and the legal problem/solution associated with it. 

I'm always looking for the smartest guy or gal in the room because. I'm just a geek who really enjoys spending time with people who are savvy, astute, original well-read, and, well-spoken.  These people tend to see things more clearly than I do and that clarity of vision often results in a way of approaching problems that generates better results in a shorter amount of time than is the norm.

One of the smartest guys in any room is AAA arbitrator and Judicate West mediator, Jay McCauley.  O.K., he's Harvard Law and I'm just a state university girl.  But pedigree doesn't matter to me.  Brilliance and creativity does.  Jay and I have recently spent a lot of time talking about the way we feel that we're sometimes talking past our attorney clients and they us.  So we have plans to write some really interesting articles that we hope will help both mediators and attorneys achieve better results more consistently when they decide to settle, rather than to try, a case.

Jay's written a lot already.  And because I'm now getting around 11,000 hits/month (!!yay!!) I've decided to simply pull up his existing articles on mediating particular commercial disputes before launching our jointly written posts.  If any of those 11,000 monthly "hits" come from commercial litigators, we'd LOVE to hear back from you on this series.  

That said, here's Jay's article on Wage and Hour Class Action Mediation.     

There is no such thing as a "cookie cutter" mediation. Nonetheless, most mediations have, among other things, the following general characteristics: 

•  At least four participants whose interests are not naturally aligned - Plaintiff, Plaintiff's counsel, Defendant and Defendant's counsel. 
• Little or no genuine concern that a settlement will foster future claims. 
• Some prospect of integrative, or "value adding," resolutions. 
• A rich body of applicable case law to serve as the empirical basis for risk-based claims valuation analysis. 
• A virtually unrestricted free market where almost any resolution agreeable to the parties can be turned into a contract fully enforceable by the courts.

Wage & hour class action mediation, by contrast, has none of these characteristics.

• Mediating with Only Three Participants

All fictions aside, there are three, not four, interested participants in a wage & hour mediation. They are the defendant, its counsel, and the counsel for the class. Plaintiffs themselves (including the named representatives) are literally absent from the negotiation altogether, and are typically absent physically from the mediation sessions.

Any imbalance resulting from the absence of plaintiffs themselves is, in theory, "corrected" by an institutional device unique to class actions: the fairness hearing, in which a court imposes outside boundaries on the settlement for the protection of the plaintiffs.

Nonetheless, the absence of the plaintiffs themselves is significant. The court is not, in any sense, a substitute negotiator for the plaintiffs. It simply either approves or rejects the settlement agreement, in accordance with reasonably well-established standards, after the settlement has been negotiated by plaintiffs' counsel and the defense team.

The actual negotiators have a common interest in avoiding agreements so extreme that they will be either rejected by the court, or undermined by excessive "opt-outs" from the plaintiffs themselves. But subject to these outside limits, the three players at the negotiating table have an interest in maximizing two things: the portion of the settlement funds that goes to plaintiffs' counsel as approved fees; and the portion of the settlement funds available to be returned or otherwise used by the defendants.

The upshot is this: Plaintiff's counsel seek, and usually get, one third of the settlement funds as fees; amounts unclaimed by class members revert to the defendant to the extent the court permits ; and the stated settlement amounts include the resulting social security and FICA charges the company will have to bear as a consequence of the settlement - an amount that turns out to be 13.85% of the total paid to the class members. These terms are easily arrived at because those at the negotiating table can "give" each other these benefits, without cost to themselves.

The absence of the plaintiff also eliminates one of the most common challenges a mediator has to face in "ordinary" litigation - the challenge of plaintiffs resisting economically advantageous proposals because of a desire to use the courts to obtain perceived benefits that go beyond economics: retribution for perceived wrongs; public vindication; and principled refuge in the Rule of Law.

This not to say that the issues addressed in wage & hour class action mediations are entirely economic. But the non-economic issues characteristically arise from the defense side, and tend to break down into two categories. The first category is the common "principled" resistance to a fairly rigid statutory scheme that typically strikes defendants as entirely inconsistent with the statutory purpose and with common sense. Specifically, those rationally thought to be managers cannot be treated as exempt in California if the time they spend in identified categories of non-exempt functions (e.g. sales) happens to take up more than half their time. The "player-manager" may be thought of as a manager, but there will be exposure if he is paid like a manager, and that fact is a hard-to-swallow surprise for many companies. 

• The Defendant's Need to Deter Future Claims
  
  Then there is the second form of defendant resistance to otherwise attractive settlement opportunities. This one is born of a genuine dilemma: the company concludes it cannot "turn managers into foremen" without losing the critical work incentives or esprit-de-corps or "company culture" that it concludes comes with classifying class members as exempt; but to "buy off" the class action claim through settlement without also turning class members into non-exempt workers for the future would be to inspire, by that act, endless waves, every three or four years, of new wage and hour claims.

These claims would come from new employees who are not collaterally estopped or otherwise bound by the class action judgment supporting the settlement. It would also come from its current employees, class members, who have a basis to argue their release can only apply to past "wrongs," but cannot release the continuing "wrongs" that take place after the release is entered into. Such companies are sorely tested take their chances at trial to escape the dilemma. The prominence of that question is an unusual hallmark of wage & hour mediations. And much of the focus of mediations I have handled has involved finding creative solutions to this very dilemma.

• The Absence of Integrative Bargaining Opportunities
  
  While there is a need to find creative techniques to subdue extraordinary needs for deterrence that wage & hour defendants will often have, there is a curious absence of opportunity to employ another form of creativity - that of finding integrative (rather than purely distributive) resolutions to the dispute. With one obvious exception , the "Jack Sprat" non-monetary exchanges that are the special joy of mediators - where parties give what's cheap to get what's dear, and thereby optimize the likelihood, as well as the quality, of the resolution - are not to be found in this arena.
  
  The reason is not that negotiators in this specialty are not creative, but simply that the inherent nature of class actions virtually eliminates any prospect that the form of any exchange will be anything other than money. Specifically, one stricture of class actions is that similarly situated class members be treated uniformly, and the only uniform needs the members will have is the presumptively universal need for money. As a result, the nature of class action bargaining is heavily distributive, not integrative. 
• The Absence of a Rich Body of Case Law to Support Risk-Based Claims Valuation Analysis
  
  It is a bit of an irony that a field which is so tilted toward distributive bargaining is also one in which mediators are essentially deprived of a major tool used to facilitate such bargaining - a substantial body of actual outcomes at trial in analogous cases to provide a realistic assessment of the actual risk of trial, and therefore the reasonable settlement value of a release. Because the large volume of wage & hour class actions is historically new, and because so few that do exist go to trial, little such evidence of likely outcomes in fact exists.
  
  What girds the negotiation in the absence of that evidence? It is four things. First, the statutory scheme in this area is fairly administrable, and results are arguably more predictable for this reason even in the absence of extensive actual results.
  
  Second, there is an extensive and ever increasing body of evidence of actual class certification decisions, and the factors relevant to class certification decisions in wage & hour actions are more closely related to the ultimate issues at trial than they are in other actions (compare, for example, securities fraud class actions, where the class certification issues have almost nothing to do with the significant issues at trial).
  
  Third, some narrowing of the range of potential settlement is achieved by the fact that extreme low ball offers typically are not made, even preliminarily, because both sides know (or can be reminded) that there is a certain threshold that will not survive a fairness hearing, nor sustain the plaintiff's counsels basic need to preserve reputation in the context of a settlement record that (unlike the settlement of individual claims) is always public.
  
  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, parties tend to be guided by a kind of "market price" for these claims - settlements tend to fall within a fairly well defined band established by publicly available information of what other cases have settled for relative to the total potential exposure in the case.
  
  What is notable is that, given the fairly strict and administrable standards of liability set forth in the statutes, the market price of the claims is probably materially below the amounts that a standard risk-based discounted claims valuation analysis would yield. This probably makes sense in light of the various incentives of the participants. Defendants need attractive offers (relative to exposure) to overcome both non-economic resistance factors as well as the lack of extensive palpable evidence of trial results. Defense counsel, paid hourly, have, if anything, an economic advantage to honor the client's resistance, as well as reputational and self-fulfillment benefits to keeping at least some quota of cases to try.

Plaintiffs' counsel, particularly specialists in demand, reach a certain threshold where the economically optimal course is to declare the offered amount to be enough and free up their time to fry another fish. And that threshold, in turn, need be no greater than a respectable outcome as compared only to the settlement market price itself. The Court, for its part, is institutionally loath to second-guess the norm, and institutionally dependant on most large cases settling in any event. Finally plaintiffs, themselves, are, for all practical purposes, absent from the process. They can opt out, and thereby preserve the right to bring claims on an individual basis, but the value of individual claims is rarely enough to warrant the transaction costs.

• Role of the Mediator
  
  It helps immensely for the mediator to have substantive familiarity with the rhythms and restrictions of class actions generally, and specific familiarity with the rights and duties of employers regarding wage and hour matters. That is the environment in which the mediator is applying his or her skills. But the mediator's primary contributions come from the use of more general "process skills" to anticipate, analyze and avert impasse in the negotiation process. Those skills are not unique to wage & hour mediations.
  
  Some taste of the actual process of analyzing and averting impasse may be provided by an actual example of an email I sent to defendant's counsel to overcome an impasse in a wage & hour class action I was mediating. The text - attached as "Attachment 1" - has been left in its raw form, with one exception: all names appearing in the original have been made generic so as to fully protect confidentiality. The case settled shortly after the email was sent.

John (Jay) McCauley is a mediator who also serves as an arbitrator on the Complex Commercial Panel of the American Arbitration Association and an Adjunct Professor at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University School of Law.  He is also a hearing officer for the ADR firm Judicate West.  

Website: www.mediate.com/mccauley.

E-mail: mailto:info@mccauleylaw.com

Phone number: (800) 848-5591.

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. . . you tend to escape gravity in a fury of creative activity.

Like this!  The Spring issue of the r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal, which has just been published and is quickly approaching it's fourth anniversary.  (see also r.kv.r.y.'s blog here!)

If you, like me, chose law as the default profession of the liberal arts major (Literature here, natch) check out our latest issue, which is full of great stuff -- more than a little of which has been written by lawyers.

Don't get me wrong -- I LOVED legal practice and am even more passionate about mediating the resolution of the type of case I litigated for 25 years -- complex commercial litigation.  

NEGOTIATING the resolution of these cases is really just the final part of my legal career -- a turn in the road that I'm more than pleased to have followed, particularly as our national recession deepens. 

Why?  Because negotiated resolutions don't depend upon court calendars, cranky and often unpredicatable Judges (my friends on the Bench excluded) or someone else's idea (12 people good and true; three arbitrators; one Judge, etc.) of what the most beneficial and fair solution to a business problem might be.

It's all of a piece, you see, because story -- as in those written by r.kv.r.y.'s contributors -- is more important to the mediated settlement of a dispute than a litigated resolution.  In mediation, we dress the "legal case" back up in all of its compelling though often messy particulars; we put the flesh and blood people back into the business problems that led them to lawyers in the first instance, permitting them do with their mutual conflict what they do best -- create a commercial solution to a business problem.  

Story. Self-determination.  Justice.

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Just a quick note on a recent appellate case here holding that where the parties have agreed to conduct their arbitration in accordance with California law, the Federal Arbitration Act does not preempt state law on arbitrability.  

The case is Best Interiors, Inc. v. Millie and Severson, Inc., here.  This is a construction case.  As soon as I read it, I'll get back to you on whether there's anything of value to be said about drafting, enforcing or resisting the enforcement of arbitration clauses in construction contracts.   

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Lawyers ask me this question more often than any other.  This week's Blawg Review Host -- TechnoLawyer -- reminded me that I once wrote a very short article on the topic -- contained in the TechnoLawyer Problem Solution Guide available again at the Blawg Review No. 152 here.

Using Your Case Management Order or ADR Panel to Convene Your Mediation

There are many reasons you may not wish to initiate mediation. Many lawyers justifiably do not wish to appear overly desirous of settlement. Others are discouraged because their opponents

• long ago indicated their client would not consider paying/accepting anything less/or more than $X, which is a non-starter;
• say they won’t consider settlement until after some key event; or,
• insist their client will “pay millions for defense but not a penny in tribute.”

The best way to encourage settlement discussions without any loss of face is to agree upon a mediator (or mediation services provider such as Southern California’s Judicate West) at the commencement of the case, authorizing the neutral to suggest mediation at any time without prompting by the parties. This is the general practice in most multi-party construction defect cases and there's no good reason to limit the benefits of this practice to complex litigators.

This strategy permits one party to suggest mediation to the neutral who can then initiate a negotiation session without divulging who, if anyone, sought the mediator’s assistance.
Any mediator worth her salt will be trained in and skilled at convening mediations without party pressure.

Some, but not all, mediation service providers also possess these skills. Judicate West’s case managers, for instance, are all skilled professionals with a minimum of five-year’s experience convening mediations for the parties.

At the commencement of your action, ascertain whether a neutral or ADR service provider in your locale specializes in the art of convening. A service provider like Judicate West will often know more about your opposition than you do, particularly in large legal markets like Southern California where you may well not “do business” with your opponent on more than one occasion.

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See Greg May on prepration for appellate oral argument  today:

Appellate judges may have a draft opinion prepared, and may rarely change their minds due to oral argument, but — according to at least one justice I’ve spoken to — sometimes they are actually looking for the appellate advocate to give them a reason to change their mind.

So, hey Greg!!  My readers, who are looking to change their opponent's case evaluation, would like to know your techniques for:  (1)ascertaining what the appellate panel most likely wants to know; and, (2) addressing their concerns in a way that would allow the Justices to reach a decision other than the one they are leaning toward!

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Check out California appellate attorney Greg May's post today -- A Dilemma for Some Defendants Who Seek to Arbitrate here.  Excerpt below.  

It’s a long-held rule in California that a defendant sued on a contract may recover attorney fees pursuant to a provision in the contract even if the defendant prevails on a theory that he was not a party to the contract or that the contract is nonexistent, inapplicable, invalid or unenforceable. The rule exists in order to further the purpose of Civil Code section 1717, which is to make unilateral fee provisions reciprocal. . . . . 

Consider now whether a similar rule should apply to arbitration provisions. . . . . Should a defendant be able to compel arbitration pursuant to a contractual arbitration provision in a contract alleged by plaintiff even if the defendant denies the existence of that contract?

The court of appeal says “no” in Brodke v. Alphatec Spine Inc., case no G038591 (4th Dist. Mar. 20, 2008). .......................

For the full post, click here.

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When we bought our house 6 years ago, Mr. Thrifty struck all ADR provisions from the sales contract.  He's come to respect ADR much more in the last few years.  Still, I believe he'd choose access to the justice system over its alternatives.

Though Mr. Thrifty -- a litigator -- was bold enough to alter a form contract, few other home buyers would be.  

Now it appears that the California courts will protect home buyers from arbitration agreements buried in the voluminous documents all home buyers sign when they purchase a house.  See Bruni v. Dideon, just decided by the Fourth Appellate District of California.  Summary below courtesy of the Metropolitan News-Enterprise. 

Where homebuyers alleged that arbitration clause was contained in preprinted and "voluminous" documents, there was no negotiation, they understood the documents were being presented to them on a "take it or leave it" basis, they [were] generally . . not familiar with real estate documents or with "legalese," were not told to read to read warranty--which contained arbitration provisions . . . .  and were not given enough time to read the warranty or any of the other documents [prior to signing, the] issue as to whether homebuyers knowingly agreed to arbitrate was subject to judicial determination regardless of provision requiring that issues regarding enforceability of arbitration clause be submitted to arbitration.

Where . . . plaintiffs had to accept arbitration provisions if they wanted to buy a house, [the]provisions were part of a preprinted form contract, any attempt to negotiate . . . . the terms of the warranty would have been fruitless, the provisions took up one page of a 30-page booklet that was buried in [a] "voluminous" stack of purchase and sale documents, and plaintiffs were never asked to read the arbitration provisions before signing, those provisions were adhesive and unconscionable, and trial court correctly exercised its discretion by refusing to enforce them.

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The prestigious Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution has a new web site -- HERE!!! -- and a few videos that the beginning mediation or settlement advocate shouldn't miss.

Here's Judge Williams, who sits in the downtown Los Angeles Superior Court as a full-time settlement judge.  In the first part of his video, Judge Williams talks about the differences between settlement and mediation as well as a few of his favorite topics -- CHOICE, RESPECT, JUDICIAL ECONOMY ACCESS TO JUSTICE and EFFICIENT CASE MANAGEMENT. 

In part 3 of the video, Judge Williams discusses basic mediation concepts such as interest-based and distributive bargaining; impasse-breakers; trust-building; shuttle negotiation diplomacy; mediators' proposals and the like. 

If I missed Judge Williams saying "you have to hang the meat low enough for the dog to smell it," I'll apologize to him for inattention the next time I see him.  If he didn't say it, I'll be looking for the next part of the video, where gems like that may be found. 

If you wonder "why the orange?" -- listen to part 3.

Judge Helen Bendix, the Chair of the Los Angeles Superior Court ADR Committee, talks about the contribution of the Court's ADR program to the administration of Justice.  That program has not only settled thousands of cases, but has served as the training ground for thousands of mediators in assisting litigants in negotiating the resolution of their lawsuits. 

Co-Directors of the Straus Institute, Tom Stipanowich and Peter Robinson address mediation issues for the first part of this video.  If you want to go directly to Judge Bendix's discussion, move the slide bar to the middle of part 1.  

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Sometimes reading my statistics page is the best way I have of taking the pulse of my readers and diagnosing the current actual rather than the aspirational state of settlement and mediation practice.

Listen.  Only the squeakiest client or party wheel will tell you that he is feeling coerced into settling the litigation that has become a millstone around your neck.

I'm talking to attorneys here -- but settlement officers, judges and mediators should pay attention as well.  Whether you're representing the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company or the 60-year old man who slipped on the iconic darkened bananna peel in the produce section of the local Ralphs, at some point during settlement negotiations your clients are going to suspect one or more of the following:

1. you're tired of his case and want to get rid of him
2. you're in cahoots with opposing counsel, with whom, frankly, you have a far more enduring if not affectionate relationship than with your client
3. you and your old buddy the mediator or settlement judge/officer have joined forces to to compel him to give up his legal rights in exchange for less money than you, his attorney, told him he was likely to recover two years ago
4. despite his protests, you, the mediator and opposing counsel keep saying the fact most important to his case  is "irrelevant" to his chances of recovery
5. when you talk to opposing counsel or the mediator about the case, he doesn't even recognize what you're talking about -- this is not the same case he brought to you to try two years ago
6. he feels extorted and no one is paying any attention to that
7. he feels like he's being sold down the river and no one is paying any attention to that
8. he paid his you and your law firm tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of millions of dollars in attorneys fees and he thinks he could have settled the case for the sum that's being offered/demanded now before he paid you to litigate this case to the settlement conference.
9. he's really really irritated now -- angry even -- though he doesn't get angry; he gets even, and he'll have no trouble spending another few million on attorneys fees so show that lying, cheating so and so in the other caucus room a thing or two
10. he's a successful business man and he's never been treated with so little respect before.

Now let me tell you something else.  If these thoughts are some of those which race through your clients' minds during settlement conferences, your mediator should be sufficiently alert to the changing temperatures in the room to address them. 

Why?

Because the mediator's job is not to settle the case.

What??????????????????????????

The mediator's job is to:

1. assist you in helping your client understand the options available to him
2. assist you in delivering bad news to your client in a way your client can hear it
3. assist you in negotiating as good a settlement as possible for your client without making your client feel as if he has no other options
4. assist you in resolving for your client the justice issues that your client originally brought to you to resolve
5. assist you in helping your client recognize and set aside the emotional experience of the settlement conference for the purpose of doing a sober cost-benefit analysis
6. assist you in helping your client recognize that legal cases change over time; sometimes getting better and sometimes getting worse, usually both in the discovery process -- this is not the case your client originally brought to you -- untarnished by the harsh adversarial systems but puts "facts" to a more exacting test than any other process in business, political or social life
7. assist you in helping your client recognize his own fallibility, potential for error, and accountability for his part of the harm for which he is seeking recompense
8. assist you in helping your client recognize that the other side -- evil, destructive and hateful as it may well be -- also has a few items of "truth" and "justice" on its side of the balance sheet
9. assist you in helping your client make an informed decision without pressure from anyone whether he wishes to accept less than he wants to or would like to take his chances at trial
10. assist you in walking away from the mediation or settlement conference with your client clapping you on the back and saying, "great work, John.  If I'm ever in need of a litigator again, rest assured it's to you I will come.  I'll tell my friends on the block or on the Board of Directors that you're the man.

How do we accomplish these ten aspirational goals together -- attorney and mediator and client?  Stay tuned.

The Jerry McGuire video above is for our clients -- with whom we do not share just how hard we are working and what a toll it takes upon us because that's what they've paid us to do -- and paid us handsomely I might add.

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But if you are still practicing law,

download this

great practice guide from

Merrill-Legal

Maintaining the Chain of Custody in Civil Litigation.

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Why do you think they call it recess?

When tempers flare to the boiling point, arbitrators who fail to prevent recess assaults are immune from suit according to the New Jersey appellate court, as detailed in this Law.com article, Arbitrator is Not Liable for Attorneys Alleged Assault here.  Excerpt below:

When fists fly at an arbitration proceeding, the arbitrator isn't liable for not averting the altercation, a New Jersey appeals court says in an interpretation of the model Arbitration Act.

The judges, in Malik v. Ruttenberg, A-6615-06, reversed a trial court's refusal to dismiss a suit charging an arbitrator knew of a lawyer's dangerous propensities yet did not remove him from the case, and an assault allegedly ensued when a recess was called.

The appeals court found that decisions relating to control of the arbitral forum are within the immunity accorded by the N.J. Arbitration Act, adopted from the model act devised by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.

Eric Tuchman, the general counsel for the American Arbitration Association -- a defendant in the case -- says the ruling is the first in the nation to interpret the act's immunity provision.

The act has been adopted in 13 states, including New Jersey, and is under consideration in four others.

"Opinions like this really permit arbitrators and sponsoring organizations to preside over and administer cases in a way that is free and impartial," Tuchman says.

For remainder of article, click here.

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The ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Presents The 10th Annual Spring Conference Pacific Currents: Sound Perspectives on ADR

April 3-5, 2008

Pacific Currents: Sound Perspectives on ADR is the premiere conference in the world for dispute resolution professionals and lawyers engaged in dispute resolution processes. This conference offers some of the best ADR CLE in the country presented by diverse and experienced faculty. With over 90 CLE programs planned, you can fulfill all of your CLE requirements over the course of a few short days.

This year’s conference also offers many dynamic and engaging plenaries.

The opening plenary entitled Hot Topics in Arbitration: The Fair Arbitration Act, Hall Street, and More will discuss the most recent developments in arbitration law, including cases pending in the Supreme Court, as well as potential arbitration-related legislation.

Linda Babcock will present the Friday morning plenary: Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Ms. Babcock will speak about the four-phase collaborative problem-solving approach to negotiation and how lawyers and mediators can use this approach to manage the reactions and emotions that may arise on both sides of a dispute.

ABA President William Neukom will deliver a keynote speech and Tom Stipanowich, Academic Director Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution and Professor of Law, Pepperdine University, will present at the Friday Luncheon.

Saturday offers The Language Conflict: How Aggression and Violence Inform the Way We Speak presented by Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith of the Center of Dispute Resolution. This skills-building plenary will examine strategies on how to turn hostile denunciations and debates into appreciative disagreements and dialogues. Don’t miss out! Register today to attend these exciting plenaries.

I'll be presenting a seminar on Intellectual Property Mediation with the Hon. John Wagner (Fed. Magistrate, Ret.) and Christine Byrd of Irell & Manella.   

To review the conference brochure click here.

Book your hotel today! The negotiated conference room rate ends soon. Contact the Sheraton Seattle Hotel & Towers at 1-800-325-3535 or register online and reference the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution 10th Annual Conference to receive the discounted conference rate of $189.

This discounted rate is available until March 4th or until the block has been filled.

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O.K., from time to time I draft a brief for someone.  It keeps my hand in the game and REALLY -- it's MUCH EASIER to make $$$ doing what I did for 25 years than for what I've been doing for four.  I have HIGH HOPES that my research and writing mini-career will soon be shut down by my ADR career, but in the meantime . .. . . .

Shameless plug:  Listen . . . . I'm very very very very good at negotiating the resolution of complex commercial litigation.  I should be in heavy rotation.  Try me!  I won't let you down.

What this post is really about

Not that long ago, appellate attorney Greg May asked the readers of his excellent California Blog of Appeal how they used the legal blogosphere to help their clients.  I answered, but I didn't have anything really exciting to report.  Until this morning.

Yesterday, I spent hours researching a fairly obscure contract interpretation question.  I didn't find case ONE and I'm a pretty good little first year research associate -- always was.  So what did I do?  I turned to my virtual buddy, Ken Adams (who never writes a rambling post like this one) over at the brilliant, thorough and sophisticated Adams Drafting.  My brain must have been turned off yesterday because I couldn't find anything by searching his blog either.

So I did what I told my readers over at the IP ADR blog to to yesterday -- say "please."

Voila!!  In my in-box this morning, a link to the most comprehensive, practical, brilliant (relatively lengthy) article ON MY PRECISE LEGAL QUESTION that could easily make the difference between winning a $2.5 million appeal or losing it.

Listen.  You can't find this stuff in academic articles.  And you can't find it in Witkin or CalJur or AmJur or in the case law.  You can't find it in the California Civil Code's canons of construction or maxims of jurisprudence (my favorite:  "superfluity does not vitiate").

Ken Adams is the foremost authority on contract drafting in the nation.  And I have that wisdom tucked into my back pocket the moment it finally occurs to me to go over to his blog to have a look see.  

So that's how I use the legal blogosphere.  It's my law firm.  It's my community.  It's my home. 

How much better does it get?

Thanks Ken!

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Negotiations of the type I mediate on a regular basis are rarely the subject of appellate opinions -- at least not the part of negotiations we call the "dance." 

Having stumbled across this opinion while searching for something else, I couldn't resist the pulll of posting it here -- both for my readers' enjoyment and, frankly, using the blog as my own personal filing cabinet for some of my favorite appellate opinions (yes, I am a geek!). 

The prose below is from Judge Barbara Johnson's dissent in a transactional legal malpractice case that made its way up to and then back down from the California Supreme Court. 

Enjoy!

From Viner v. Sweet (2004) 117 Cal.App.4th 1218, 1251-1252.

Contract negotiations are fluid events. Offers and counteroffers, and counter-counter offers, and counter-counter-counteroffers, etc., typically flow back and forth across the table. It is a sophisticated ballet often ending in mid-pirouette or even mid-leap-when the contract is finally signed. But if one side of the negotiations stops the dance too soon, only because their lawyer promises them they have the very terms they told him they wanted despite the fact they don't, that side should not be foreclosed from suing their lawyer for his malpractice. It is one thing if the lawyer only misjudges when the deal is at the optimum for his clients. It is entirely different when the lawyer misrepresents the terms of the deal-as the evidence indicates happened here-and thus leads his clients to sign a bad contract. 


Under this third scenario, whether the plaintiff would or would not have been better off with “no deal” than the deal they got is simply irrelevant. Also irrelevant is whether they could have obtained the exact deal they wanted and thought they had. The real question is whether they could have gained a better deal than they ended up with, had the negotiations continued. In most instances under this third scenario, it will not prove to be quite as good a deal as they thought they had. That is, to gain some favorable contract language important to them, they may well have to give somewhat on other contract terms. But almost certainly it will be a “better net deal” than the one they mistakenly signed.


If juries are capable of deciding Lightstone would or would not have accepted terms more favorable to the Viners, they certainly can be entrusted with the determination whether Lightstone would have accepted those terms if the Viners had offered new terms on other issues, which terms were more favorable to him. Cross-examination often would prove especially revealing-as someone in Lightstone's position was exposed to a succession of questions about what changes in the Viners' position on certain contract terms might have caused him to alter his position on other terms.

For instance, had the Viners offered to reduce the price of purchasing their stock by $250,000, would Lightstone have been willing to modify the ambiguous language in 1.10 that arguably prevented them from pursuing movie and television deals with Dove authors and readers? How about if they cut the price by $500,000? How much did Dove's earnings increase because of the existence of that language in 1.10? Furthermore, beyond cross-examination of this nature, other testimony and circumstances also could point in the same direction. If the negotiations had not stopped in mid-stream because Sweet erroneously told the Viners they had already “won,” further negotiations would have been possible and would have led to a more favorable contract (perhaps to both sides) than the one they signed.

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Help me... help you. Help me, help you.  Jerry Mcguire

Two short-short stories.  Both to acquaint you with who I was as a litigator and how I can help you as a mediator.

A Born Moralist

I was on the telephone with my client talking about a Rand Corp. statistical study that was originally prepared as answers to contention interrogatories (!!) but eventually became the centerpiece of Plaintiff's proof that my client had engaged in a massive conspiracy to drive the Plaintiff out of business.  Claimed damages soaking wet:  $250 million.

I was talking about how wrong the opposition was on so many levels -- evidentiarily, practically, legally and, yes, morally.

My client said, "I've finally figured out what you are."

"Yes?"

"You, Vickie, are a born moralist."

And I took that to be a compliment. 

Anything You Can Get Away With

Toward the end of my career all my cases seemed to hover around the quarter-billion dollar mark.  This one was an environmental coverage suit for a major petroleum company's potential liablities for 500 + toxic waste sites in every Canadian province.  This is one of the few cases in which the insurance carrier can wear a "white hat."  My client -- Lloyds of London.

This stuff is complicated.  It involves coverage across a couple of decades and up the ladder of excess policies to the billion dollar mark.  We use "coverage charts" -- often color coded -- to understand the policy profile at a glance.

At every oral argument in the trial court -- up to the winning summary judgment motion -- I arrived with a clutch of color-coded coverage charts that  supported my client's position.  On every occasion, plaintiff's counsel complained about the charts.  But he never brought competing charts with him.  The Judge -- one of the best on the Superior Court bench -- really wanted to understand the issues and get it right.  So she spent each oral argument listening to both parties while scrutinizing my coverage charts.

I genuninely believe that this is why I won.

What Does This Have to Do wit