On February 2, 2017, the California Law Revision Commission (CLRC) held its regular meeting in which it once again discussed mediation confidentiality. While the Commissioners seemingly did not make any great strides, at the same time, they did. I make this contradictory statement because at its September 2016 meeting, the [Read More]
I saw a blog on the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School’s web page written by its staff (January 12, 2017) entitled “How Mood Affects Negotiators”. It caught my attention because I had just witnessed this effect in two of my mediations. Recently, I held two mediations on [Read More]
Once again, the California Legislature was hard at work in 2016 passing 893 laws, most of which went into effect on New Year’s Day, 2017. While most of them are probably relevant addressing critical issues, there are a few that provide wonderment, invoking the question, “why?” and “what is the [Read More]
First and foremost- Happy New Year! May it bring you health and happiness and quick and peaceful resolutions to all of your disputes. On my first day back in the office, I read the Kluwer Mediation blog (January 2, 2017). The author- Geoff Sharp wrote on “Chunking Up and Down- [Read More]
About a week before Christmas, LiveScience published an article reviewing two studies suggesting “… that our brains prompt us to act more like Santa than Scrooge. (Id. at Your Giving Brain: Are Humans Hardwired for Generosity? by Mindy Weinberger (December 19, 2016.).) Based on two different research experiments, the researchers [Read More]
Not everyone lives the way we do. And just because someone may do things very differently than we might does not mean that what he alleges as happening is false. In social psychology circles, this tendency to discount others who do not share our world view is called “naïve realism” [Read More]
Although as a full time neutral, I usually get paid for mediating, as a way to give back to the community, I am on various state and federal court mediator panels in which parties can utilize my services for a certain number of hours on a pro bono basis or [Read More]
On December 1, 2016, The California Law Revision Commission (“CLRC”) met once again to discuss its Study K-402-Relationship Between Mediation Confidentiality and Attorney Malpractice and Other Misconduct. In each of its meetings in and after August 2016, the CLRC decided to create the exception and made other recommendations on this [Read More]
