The Unsung Mediators of Nashville

I just returned from Nashville, Tennessee for the International Academy of Mediator's Conference. What a fabulous experience! We heard music everywhere with the most compelling, engaging lyrics anywhere. We saw amazing artwork in the botanical gardens by the Glass Artist, Chihuly and an Impressionist Exhibit at The Frist Museum. And we heard original music performed at The Bluebird Cafe, the Honky Tonks and by Alex Harvey, writer of "Delta Dawn" and Sammi Moore (beautiful young artist with a soul that belies her tender years). We heard from W. J. Michael Cody, the Attorney hired to represent Martin Luther King in Memphis the day before his assassination and heard his famous "I have a Dream" speech about growing up White and Southern and the beginnings of the civil rights movement there. He introduced us to one of our own members, George Brown, who was the First African-American in history to be appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court and who partnered with Cody to bring pro bono legal services to the African-American community in Memphis as a young lawyer. From beginning to end, this was a conference, an experience, a memory to last a lifetime and I am so grateful and humbled to have participated.

Insightful Closings

Los Angeles lost a great friend and "Granddaddy of Mediation", Richard Millen, last week. I had the good privilege of knowing Richard well, as he had a seat on the Board of the Southern California Mediation Association "in perpetuity" during my term as President there and we sat together on the State Bar's ADR Committee. If I could capture his philosophy in a very few words, he was a defender of the process of mediation as an essentially human prospect. He was, although a lawyer himself, quite opposed to the legalistic (or commercial) approach to human conflict. So it was with great interest that I attended the International Academy of Mediator's Conference in Salt Lake City where four highly regarded commercial mediator's from London, England to Cleveland, Ohio to Northern and Southern California, revealed their most "insightful closings". All of them involved human conflict which took self-confident and highly competent lawyers taking a step back to allow their clients to truly express themselves in the heartbreak they'd suffered in order to resolve both the emotional and the financial issues that stood between them. I'll give Richard Millen's legacy the credit for shining a light on the "mediation" of the two strains of conflict within our own community: it's okay to "Show me the Money" if you can also meet the human needs by addressing the emotional factors in mediation. Thanks, Richard, and rest in peace. Your legacy will live on.

Lessons from the International Academy of Mediators

I attended an excellent Professional Conference this month in London, The International Academy of Mediators, "What Can we Learn from Each Other". During the conference, a full day's mock mediation was staged. It was the first I'd ever seen where professional actors were employed to demonstrate the raw emotionality that so often surfaces in civil mediation. So this week, I gave it a try. I facilitated two joint sessions in cases in which I would normally have kept the parties separate. In the first, the lawyer blew up and shouted in ways that were unexpected to me, her client and opposing counsel. Just as I had observed Avi Schneerson at the IAM do, I sat quietly and allowed that anger to boil over into the joint session. Within a very few minutes, there were huge concessions following that outburst and the case was settled within 30 minutes thereafter. In the other case, I spent over two hours preparing for the hearing by discussing the relative positions of the parties through their counsel. This one turned out to be more procedural than fact-based, but the lawyers weren't communicating with one another, rather they were busy advocating for their clients. So I took the chance to conduct that one with all lawyers together in a joint session for almost all of the negotiation. Lo and behold, they were much more civil to one another when sitting together in a room without their clients then I would have anticipated and the case was also settled in 4 hours. Thanks to my fellow IAM members, and a couple of paid actors, the theater of my mediation hearings proved to be a great laboratory for new lessons learned, including bravely allowing conflict and emotionality to be demonstrated publicly in order to truly allow the parties to get to a resolution.