A good friend emailed me the other day asking if I had written anything recently on mediation confidentiality. I decided to call her in response, wondering if I had missed any news. It turned out that she had a student who questioned the value and effectiveness of confidentiality in mediation. [Read More]
Suppose you are mediating a divorce in which the wife agrees to accept 25% of the community assets in settlement even though a court would award her 50%. She wants the matter concluded as quickly as possible in the worst way and so will accept anything to be done with [Read More]
Last semester, one of my students took the wrong take home exam. So, I prepared a special make up exam which was simple yet required a lot of thought: Rank in terms of importance five of the nine model standards in the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators and explain [Read More]
Recently, the topic of whether mediators should draft settlement agreements arose in my mediation ethics class. I suggested that if the parties have attorneys, the mediator should encourage the attorneys to draft the agreement. A student took issue stating that then the mediator loses “control”. I disagreed noting that the [Read More]
Once again, I am teaching mediation ethics to graduate students at the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been focusing on “informed consent.” Standard I of the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators covers self-determination and mandates that [Read More]
This past Monday--March 20- marked the ten-year anniversary of the International Day of Happiness. Evidently, it was created by a United Nations Resolution passed at its 118th plenary meeting on June 28, 2012, declaring March 20th of each year to be the holiday. As one might guess, the resolution was [Read More]
As part of my preparation to teach a class on mediation confidentiality, I reviewed the Uniform Mediation Act with all of its comments (UMA). In doing so, it struck me that although mediation is extremely popular and common place, it would be good to remind ourselves why we should mediate [Read More]
I will never understand why people go to mediation (and pay lots of money to a mediator) when they are not prepared to settle. I had another one of those mediations recently that went nowhere even before it started. I knew something was amiss when I did not receive any [Read More]
