The firm of Ogletree Deakins and St. Louis University recently held an all-day Employee Dispute Resolution Symposium at the University's very beautiful Busch Student Center. The proceedings were well-attended and it was a privilege for me to be invited to present the opening remarks. The comments of the various speakers, many from...
Thanksgiving is one of the most popular holidays of the year for Americans. It is also culturally becoming. We are encouraged to pause and reflect on what we have received, especially from those no longer at the table. (There are, as always, other ways to look at it -- Ayn Rand famously called it a typical...
For as long as I've been active in conflict management, I have been confronted with a quote from Abraham Lincoln about not stirring up litigation. I first saw it on a pamphlet at CPR in 1998. Since then I have since seen it in articles, pamphlets, traning materials, mediation center...
The first part of this post analogized the use of arbitration to resolve employee disputes to using a wood chisel to smash a boulder -- the wrong tool for the job. At its conclusion I said that, sympathetic as I am to employees, it was the effect on chisel, not the rock, that...
One hot, lonely summer day in 1958, at our rural home near Crozet, Virginia, I was working on an 8-year old's project: dislodging a big quartz rock that was buried in the gravel driveway. After a few hours I realized the trowel just wouldn't do the job. So I found a wood...
Enough time has passed since one of our Congressmen publicly accused our president of lying, to allow reflective rumination on the implications to ADR of disputants' arguing the facts....
This final post from the Madrid IBA Conference concerns a panel of corporate users who were asked whether subject-matter competence was an important factor in selection of a mediator....