David Hoffman from the Boston Law Collaborative offered a program at the ABA Dispute Resolution Section Spring Meeting on “Mediator as Moral Witness: Right and Wrong.” The question presented was: What happens when moral issues arise in the course of a mediation? And, according to Hoffman, they always do. ...
In Houston, UIA World Mediation Forum Co-President Thierry Garby moderated a panel on mediator ethics. Speakers included Claude Amar, President of the French Academy of Mediators; Trey Bergman of Houston; Jim Lawrence of the University of Houston Law Center; and Patrick van Leynseele of Dal & Veldekens, Brussels....
The Marie L. Garibaldi American Inn of Court for ADR is the first (and so far the only) Inn of Court devoted expressly to the practice of arbitration, mediation and other non-judicial means of dispute resolution. Located in New Jersey, it gathers, on a monthly basis, the upper echelon of retired and...
An attorney keeps her client files on the hard drive of her laptop. These files include confidential and sensitive client information, and attorney-client communications. Leaving a dentist appointment, she discovers that her car's windows have been smashed and that the property inside the car -- including her GPS and her laptop -- have been...
Two recent court decisions have bubbled through the cyber-community of ListServes and blogs. Both address attorney disqualification -- one in the context of a mediation and the other in the context of an arbitration. The latter is featured here and the former will be described in a subsequent posting. In Northwestern...
If nothing is ever as simple as it looks, then the seemingly simple rules of mediation confidentiality are particularly complex. A group of colleagues was discussing the following hypothetical and could reach no clear conclusion: A mediation session concludes with defendant's counsel agreeing to revert to his (governmental) client to determine if...
Thanks to the indefatigable Paul Lurie for posting, on his arbitration/mediation Listserve, the news of the recent release of the Annotated Code of Arbitrator Ethics. The Revised Code of Ethics for Arbitrators in Commercial Disputes was released in 2004 by the American Bar Association and the American Arbitration Association. This newly...