Many mediators in California will acknowledge that most parties in litigated cases do not like joint sessions and prefer to mediate using caucuses or separate sessions only. There are various reasons for this, among them a belief that counsel may lose control of the situation, that the joint session will [Read More]
As some of you may recall, the California Law Revision Commission issued its Tentative Recommendation late last year to create an exception to mediation confidentiality. However, the proposed statute could not find a sponsor and so never got introduced into the legislature. Instead, Senator Wieckowski introduced SB 954 on January [Read More]
My husband is known as an “aggressive driver” who, being impatient, takes unnecessary risks in his driving. When I mention these attributes to him, he retorts that he has yet to have an accident after all of these decades. In sum, like many of us, he is over confident in [Read More]
Recently, I conducted a mediation in which defense counsel was very candid with me by advising that she was there only because the court ordered the mediation and her client would just assume take the matter to trial. In this connection, she further advised that her client has been taking [Read More]
What do you see? In a March 13, 2018 post, LiveScience.com contributor Jasmin Malik Chua published an article on the value of optical illusions. Entitled “What This Optical Illusion Reveals About the Human Brain”, Ms. Chua replicates a 19th century optical illusion which can be either a rabbit or a [Read More]
Once again, I return to the subject of “fake news”; this time because of a recent study just published in Science on March 8, 2108. The study- conducted by 3 MIT scholars- Soroush Vosough, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral – found that “… false news spreads more rapidly on the [Read More]
Lawsuits are often about money. And the plaintiff often thinks that if she wins and gets all this money- she will be quite happy. And conversely, a defendant thinks that if she wins, she will save a whole lot of money which will make her happy! Well… as one might [Read More]
As of last fall 2017, I am a Lecturer in Law at the University of Southern California (USC) Gould School of Law teaching ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) Ethics. I teach mediation ethics while my co-teacher covers arbitration ethics. With this perspective in mind, the recently filed lawsuit by Stormy Daniels [Read More]
