Arbitration & Mediation

Settling Lawsuits: Money is the Instrument but Justice is the Issue

By Victoria Pynchon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money is the instrument.  But justice is the issue.

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1/  More about this at IP ADR later today.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).