Sid Lezak

It is with great sadness that I record the death of mediation trail blazer, Sid Lezak of Portland, Oregon earlier this week.

Moooooooooooooooooooo

Get me out of here

...this week its been a herd of milking cows (you know they agreed not to wander if the farmer would only agree to warm his hands) - those babies are as good as a printing press with butter milk at $5.40 per kilo.

...then it was another errant CEO who got offside with his Board and wanted money to clear out his desk.

To finish the week off, a winery with problems over its American distributor - too much money spent marketing in Boise, Idaho and not enough in New York, New York (boy, do Kiwi's and Americans negotiate differently).

A great low cal diet of good commercial conflict.

But hey, come Wednesday I'm hoping to post from some groovy internet cafe in Boston where this farm boy will be attending the spring conference of the International Academy of Mediators - Dialogue at Harvard: Master Thinkers Meet Master Practitioners.

That means an awful lot of masters loitering around but hopefully I'll get to hang out with some of them.

On the way, I'm going to drop in for a beer with mates at Venice Beach, work on my tan and meet with the folks from Pepperdine University's Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution on the hill at Malibu.

Practise your PA's 'don't come Monday' speech

I've recently posted on the trials and tribulations of mediator scheduling here and here, in particular Trumba and how cool it is when it sync's with Outlook.

Well, I got a ring from Tom over at Trumba a few days back.

He's working on individual mediator web calendars with client booking capacity...which means trusted repeat users can check out availability then tentatively book time...

...whereupon I receive an alert and start my normal intake process. (Intake for me includes a conference call a month or so out from mediation day so they'll also be able to book that call and receive an email reminder the day before!)

Stay tuned...

MacDonald Mediation Inc (2)

A while ago I wondered aloud about the value to our community of pay-to-belong mediator outfits like this clipping the ticket.

Now Mediation Law Firms run by Joe Butch of Fort Lauderdale no less, has coined the phrase 'mediation law' (gotta love it!) and says:

'Mediation law is becoming a popular way to help settle arguments between two or more people. Mediation law has successfully been applied to various legal topics. They include: divorce mediation, peer mediation, family mediation, federal mediation, child custody mediation and conflict mediation. If you feel that going through a lengthy and costly court battle is not for you, contact our expert mediation law attorneys today for help'

Make Like My Pants And Split!

In an effort to keep this blog true to its beginnings, I continue to post on the minutiae of the mediation table.

Today for instance, a rather large women broke one of my chairs!

Mediators should size up, like hospitals.

Snap!

Two things.

Today I pulled out of a mediation briefly – the short story is my 14 year old fell over and broke his arm.

The long story is if he hadn’t been playing cricket on concrete with his shoe laces undone, yady yady ya...

My post on mediators’ stuff happening outside the mediation room reads well here.

Second thing.

I picked him up from school, went to the medical centre, saw a doctor, got x-rayed, saw the doctor again who slapped on a plaster cast – all for NZ$27 (that’s about US$20).

Reason – in New Zealand we have a no-fault personal injury system called ACC and there is no liability for personal injury.

When we are injured by accident we don't sue, instead the State pays our medical costs and any lump sum compensation. (A personal injury is a physical injury, a mental injury caused by a physical one or mental injury after sexual assault or abuse).

Even if you're visiting New Zealand you can claim - as long as you are injured in New Zealand (but don’t fall on your cruise ship gangplank or airline airbridge, as the cases say you are not really here yet). It even covers us when we visit you.

It’s a stretch but this connects to mediation.

Because of ACC there is no medical malpractice litigation industry, therefore no med/mal mediation, therefore no high volume repeat business.

What that means is that there is no ADR sausage factory.... as a commercial mediator this kiwi gets no med/mal, no slip and fall....no steady bread and butter stuff that I hear you guys in the US talking about (and unrelated to that, no employment mediation as the government provides salaried mediators to do all employment disputes).

BUT it means those in private mediation practice have come of age on extremely diverse 'pure' commercial/business mediations that are usually multi faceted with non dollar issues for traction.

Volumes are not ideal but it means competition is keen and if you can get the work, its a healthy low cal diet.

I know there is some thought of medical liability reform in California to shut the med/mal industry down and some mediators are flipping out over the prospect of that work disappearing.

But the day mediation needs litigation rather than the other way around, things are screwed anyway.

Bottom line? Try getting your arm in plaster for $20.

Blogging?...Try This

So, You Want To Make The World A Better Place?

And you think this is a vocation not a job, right?

Well sorry - we mediators, we nobel conflict management specialists dedicated to reducing the amount of conflict in this stressed world of ours are just making things worse.

From the UK, Dr John Clark argues in an insightful article that the growing acceptance of mediation will not only increase the number of commercial disputes, but will also lead to significant shifts in the structure of the commercial litigation market. There will be winners and losers as a result.

Yeah, I get it. It's like, when they build a new 8 lane freeway, it just means more cars because its easier to get around.

John's theory is that if it is now cheaper to have a dispute, more people will do it!...[read more].

From my own self [absorbed/centered/concerned/indulgent/interested/serving] mediator's perspective...

...is there a problem?

MESO Soup For The Soul

This guy was a great negotiator.

Plenty of energy and plenty of angles... just hope he's not minded to jump the tracks and hang out a mediator's shingle.

The morning was spent exploring unmapped and little understood areas of the claim with some BIG FAT questions, all open and inviting. Questions like;

>OK, you say we stuffed up, what should we have done when we got your letter?
>So, what might have been - if all this hadn't turned on its head ...where would we be now?
>When we did X, how did you perceive us? Do you want to know what we thought?

But his best move was reserved for after lunch with Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers

He put 3 tentative endings out there. All were endings he could live with and all were of the same value as far as he was concerned.

By offering multiple proposals he communicated flexibility (I am willing to construct the deal in different ways depending upon your priorities), but allowed himself to be aggressive (I can anchor all of the packages to my advantage and I can be more persistent in my demands because I have already signaled flexibility) while gathering information about the other side's priorities*

*Husted Medvec and others - Choice and Achievement at the Bargaining Table: The Distributive, Integrative, and Interpersonal Advantages of Making Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers