Arbitration & Mediation

Negotiating Government: Triage the Vote

Posted on November 03, 2008
UPDATE:  Courtesy of Blawg Review #184 over at The Faculty Lounge is a link to the Voter Suppression Wiki Home Page. CNN was reporting yesterday that in early voting the elderly gave up waiting to vote because they couldn't stand in line for 3+ hours...

Negotiate Your Government: Vote!!

Posted on November 02, 2008
Polling Place Finder Here from Vote411   You can search the system system to find out all you need to know about the electoral process in your state (Registration deadline, ID requirements, Voting Machines, etc) by either selecting a your state or customizing your search for specific information Instructions: Select your state from the drop-down menu or map below to find information specifically for where you live...

Make Sure Your Vote Counts with NPR-Twitter Vote Monitor Project

Posted on October 31, 2008
Help NPR Identify Voting Problems:  Entire NPR Post Below If you have any voting problems, NPR wants to hear about them. As part of Twitter Vote Report – a project born out of a collaboration of volunteer software developers, bloggers and the NPR social media desk – we'll be monitoring voter irregularities, everything from long waits and broken voting machines to polling places with insufficient ballots...

The Toughest Negotiation - Time to Build Your Practice

Posted on October 31, 2008
By Guest Blogger Renée Barrett aka AAARenee  One of my favorite movie quotes is from Angelica Houston’s character in Ever After. As the wicked stepmother, she declares to her favorite daughter Darling, nothing is final until you're dead, and even then, I'm sure God negotiates...

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Cyber-Bully Mom Still on the Ropes

Posted on October 30, 2008
Thanks to St. Louis Today's twitter feed -- Judge in Los Angeles Still Undecided in Cyber-Bully Case -- for hipping us to what's going on in our own backyard.   By Robert Patrick ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 10/30/2008 A federal judge in Los Angeles has once again failed to decide whether to throw out the criminal charges against former Dardenne Prairie resident Lori Drew, accused of the cyber-bullying that caused or contributed to the suicide of 13-year-old neighbor in St...

Negotiating a Conflict-Resolved Workplace

Posted on October 30, 2008
Want a horror story for Halloween? Remember that Heller Ehrman collapse?  Seems that you don't get COBRA benefits if the health plan your former employer maintained is kaput because it has gone out of business. Now think, pending surgery, no health insurance, pre-existing condition...

Negotiating a Better Health Care Plan for Your Employees

Posted on October 30, 2008
Check out Dan Schwartz's post - A New Approach to Health Care - at the Connecticut Employment Law Blog.  The focus on value rather than cost is what we've been preaching here at Settle It Now from the start.  Snippet below but click on over to Dan's place for the goods on win-win health care solutions...

Down to the Wire: Making Your Vote Count: Justice Flourishes Only in a Healthy Democracy

Posted on October 29, 2008
UPDATE:  REPORT YOUR VOTE EXPERIENCES ON TWITTER VOTE REPORT HERE Here's a helpful list from this morning's Today Show on how to insure that the vote you cast is counted thanks to LegalMaven at Twitter this morning: Confirm your registration before you go to the polls here in Nevada, the early vote poll workers will check for you if you drop by one of the hundreds of nearby polling places here in Nevada, you DO NOT NEED TO VOTE AT ANY PARTICULAR VOTING PLACE if you vote on or before October 31...

The Journey to Empathy Begins with Listening and is Nurtured by Meditation

Posted on October 28, 2008
by Guest Blogger Martin Golder Empathy is not only a central tool In conflict resolution, but also a way of being.  And yet I remember that when I started in my first mediation course I was unsure of what it was. It even took a while to learn the difference between empathy and sympathy...

Mediating? A Savvy Plaintiff's Attorney Tells You How

Posted on October 28, 2008
by Guest Blogger Brian Herrington Don’t Agree To Mediate Too Soon In The Litigation The mediation of litigated cases involving personal or economic injury should mainly be about money. Unless the issues of law and fact have been fully fleshed out, mediation sessions get bogged down in contentions about ultimate facts and conclusions of law that neither side can "win...

Why Common Sense, Compassion and Listening Twice As Much As You Talk Are The Best Negotiation Strategies In Law and Life

Posted on October 27, 2008
Guest Blogger - Susan Cartier Liebel First, I'm honored to be guest blogging while Vickie is away campaigning her heart out until November 4. I'm also a little intimidated to be here as I can't speak on negotiation with the authority Vickie can, after all she's a distinguished and honored expert on the topic...

FEHA Attorney Fees Unavailable Under Cal Civil Code 998

Posted on October 23, 2008
Civil Procedure Sec. 998--which permits a defendant to shift costs to plaintiff if plaintiff rejects a settlement offer and then fails to obtain a more favorable judgment--does not eliminate substantive requirements for awarding attorney fees to a prevailing Fair Employment and Housing Act defendant; prevailing defendant in FEHA action is only entitled to recover fees if plaintiff rejects defendant's settlement offer, fails to obtain a more favorable judgment, and plaintiff's action was without any legal or factual foundation...

Is Law Becoming a Clerical Function? Email and its Discontents

Posted on October 23, 2008
Over at the Mimosa Systems Blog, we get some good advice about in-house eDiscovery management.  What does this have to do with conflict resolution?  Some of our smartest, most well-educated, highly compensated, creative and dynamic conflict resolution specialists -- litigators -- are in imminent danger of becoming clerical workers...

Rock Paper Scissors Dispute Resolution

Posted on October 22, 2008
Thanks to Tammy Lenski over at Twitter (follow her!) for passing along Pop Crunch's photo of the best dispute resolution street sign ever posted (with all due deference to NYC's "Don't Even Think About Parking Here." I can't download it to post it so you must click here for it to make your conflict resolution day...

Guilty of Betraying Niche; Posting Politics on Another Blog

Posted on October 22, 2008
Every time I post something political, I can see Kevin O'Keefe wince.  "Your blog says 'everything you always wanted to know about negotiation,'" Kevin once said to me.  "And you're blogging about Guantanamo.  You are betraying your readers and they will leave you...

Bring Your No. 2 Pencil to Blawg Review #182

Posted on October 22, 2008
I'm poll watching in Nevada. Why this is so exhausting I'm not certain.  The poll workers are uniformly great.  Patient.  Persistent.  Painstaking.  The people who are voting remind me of jurors in the way they approach their civic duty...

Obama and the Politics of Despair

Posted on October 18, 2008
There's nothing like getting a new Harpers in the mail to upset my idealistic dreams of a new America flourishing under an Obama administration.  Here's the opening November '08 Harpers slap-in-the-face for dreamy liberals like me: After eight years of catastrophic Republican misrule—in the midst of economic crisis and rising unemployment, in a nation plagued by ruinous energy costs and inflation, bank failures, and staggering public and private corruption—an eloquent, charismatic, intelligent Democratic candidate was locked in a statistical tie with a doddering old hack whose primary argument for his claim to the most powerful office on earth is that he was shot down over Vietnam and tortured for five years...

Hope, Safety and Innovation

Posted on October 17, 2008
The first thing we mediators are taught (after digesting the imperative to "be conscious") is that people in conflict need to be in an atmosphere of hope and safety to be able to:  (1)  recognize the point of view of another; (2) be accountable for his/her own "part" in the dispute; and, (3) generate creative solutions to bust past impasse...

What We Think We Know Can Hurt Our Negotiating Position

Posted on October 16, 2008
I watched the debate last night with people who support my candidate.  They all also happened to be mediators, so they understand concepts like confirmation bias --the tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs...

Blawg Review # 181 Celebrates International Conflict Resolution Day

Posted on October 13, 2008
It's effective, it's efficient and it's client-centered.  Just what we need to weather the financial storm.  What?  The mediated resolution of litigated cases.  Nobody blogs it better than Diane Levin at the Mediation Channel, who hosts Blawg Review # 181 in celebration of International Conflict Resolution Day...

What Times are These? The Unruly Tyranny of Mobs

Posted on October 11, 2008
Bertolt Brecht wrote, "what times are these/when a poem about trees is almost a crime/because it contains silence/against so many outrages." The same can be said for a post about negotiation strategy and tactics. My friend and colleague, mediator and AAA arbitrator Deborah Rothman just returned from a very short vacation to Paris and the view from Europe is one of fear and growing alarm about the manner in which our political process has degenerated into hate-filled cries from the crowds at Republican rallies (see Rage Rising on the McCain Campaign Trail)...

Armed Conflict and Sexual Assault

Posted on October 06, 2008
Sending this in complete from Paris, noting that women, who hold civil society together in the course of armed conflict, are rarely at the table when peace is being negotiated.  As this lengthy piece asserts, we cannot ignore the sexual assaults that continue after "peace" has been achieved...

Mediation Ideologies and Settling Your Commercial Litigation

Posted on October 01, 2008
Geoff Sharp at Mediator blah blah today asks the first academic question with which I was forced to grapple in my LL.M studies at the Straus Institute -- can you cherry pick transformative mediation techniques to settle commercial litigation?   I realized I had re-entered the academy the day Joe Folger -- author, with Baruch Bush, of The Promise of Mediation -- said only transformative mediation "works" and its principles  must be strictly followed...

Helping Employees Help You Help Them

Posted on October 01, 2008
Earlier this week I was asked the following question by a concerned General Counsel:  how can we help our employees grapple with on-the-job justice issues without leading them to believe that our proposed solutions are untrustworthy.   The problem, as eloquently described by a lengthy email posing the question, is one that all employers face, large and small...

Ken Adams -- That's Conflict PREVENTION and Resolution

Posted on September 30, 2008
My only regret about leaving legal practice when I did is that I did so before Ken Adams started the AdamsDrafting Blog.  Now he's made me doubly regretful, having published A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, Second Edition.  See the ABA Q&A with Adams here...

Negotiating the Economy: You Can't Save Your Face and Your Ass at the Same Time

Posted on September 30, 2008
See Marginal Revolution's post today The problem is that both of you are right citing David Brooks for the proposition that the "failure to pass the bailout represents a massive failure of American governance and leadership, most of all at the Congressional level...

More Dangers in Negotiating by Email

Posted on September 29, 2008
Over at IP ADR, we warned against using email to negotiate because the social scientists tell us that it is "profoundly anti-social," i.e., we're less generous when we respond to an offer via email than when we're negotiating face to face. Today, Scientific American warns us that emailers tend to deceive one another more readily than do those who use pencil and pad -- see Business, Lies and Email here, excerpt below...

New California Case on Mediation Confidentiality and Recovery of 1717 Attorney Fees

Posted on September 25, 2008
Go to the IP ADR Blog.  I'll cover this later but am leaving for the Cal. State Bar Conference RIGHT NOW!

Law Blogger Get Together at State Bar Convention in Monterey

Posted on September 23, 2008
ATTENTION all legal bloggers and would-be bloggers!! Those of us who will be attending the State Bar Convention in Monterey this weekend will be meeting at 5 pm on Saturday evening in the Fireside Lounge here. Please let me know if you'll be able to attend by dropping me an email at vpynchon@settlenow...

Negotiating Politics: The Issues: Guantanamo

Posted on September 23, 2008
Because I'm heading for a swing state to campaign after the State Bar Convention and a brief vacation, I am starting a string of posts on talking about politics with your colleagues, friends and families.  There is a way to do this without harming your relationships...

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