One cardinal rule of negotiation is that one should not bid against herself. That is, negotiation should be a two-way conversation in which party A makes an offer to which party B responds with a counter offer to which party A responds with a new offer and so on. But [Read More]
It is funny how sometimes the stars align to suddenly highlight an issue that was nowhere in my conscious brain before then. Last night, I received an emergency e mail asking if I could help a fellow professor with her class tonight. I looked at my schedule and found I [Read More]
I have said this before and will say it again: talking to the other party does wonders. After mediating more than 2,000 cases, I am still at a loss to understand why parties in litigation are afraid to sit down with each other and discuss the issues directly. ( I [Read More]
I had a really weird almost mediation recently. It was a lemon law matter. It cancelled at the last minute simply because plaintiff’s counsel (let’s call her Joan) was sending another attorney (let’s call her Janice) in her stead. The defendant did not like this substitution and so cancelled. It [Read More]
One well known mantra of mediators is that it is always better to mediate prior to filing a lawsuit than to incur the time and expense lawsuits entail. Most lawyers will tell you that litigation is the most expensive and least efficient way of resolving a matter; yet, they will [Read More]
I stumbled upon an article in mediate.com discussing an empirical study conducted in the Singapore Courts about their use of mediation. The actual article, (How Should the Courts Know Whether a Dispute is Ready and Suitable for Mediation? An Empirical Analysis of the Singapore Courts’ Referral of Civil Disputes to [Read More]
Senator John McCain died last Saturday- August 25, 2018. And since then, tributes and remembrances have been pouring in from all over the world. Except for one person: The President of the United States. On Saturday, in a very terse tweet, he sent his condolences and sympathies to Senator McCain’s [Read More]
Many, many years ago, someone once said to me that people do not begin to negotiate until it is past the time to negotiate. How true this can be as borne out by a recent mediation. The matter involved the purchase and sale of a condo. The mediation was held [Read More]
