One adage that I learned early on in my career is that disputes usually arise due either to a lack of communication or to a miscommunication. My own personal experience provides yet another example. I have two English Springer Spaniels: Buddy and Cookie. Buddy is an aggressive male while Cookie [Read More]
Last week’s mail brought a Los Angeles County Superior Court Jury Summons by which I am ordered to be available in March for civil jury trials at the main civil courthouse in downtown Los Angeles ….in the middle of a pandemic. Needless to say, due to the surge of the [Read More]
The Broadway musical, "Rent" has a song entitled "Seasons of Love" which starts off by asking: Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. Five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear. five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure, Measure a year? In daylights? In [Read More]
Recently, a friend of mine challenged me to write a blog about how to survive Thanksgiving dinner considering our recent election. Some will be happy while others will be distraught at the results; yet we will all be sitting around the same table (virtually?) breaking bread together. She then told [Read More]
The high holy holiday of Yom Kippur was celebrated recently. The bad news is that no one could attend services in person. The good news is that services were on Zoom which enabled me (for the first time in decades) to attend services in my hometown-2700 miles away. There, the [Read More]
It has been about 4 months or so since the Covid 19 crisis started mandating that we all stay home or close to it, wear masks and wash our hands a lot. Consequently, many of us are now working from home and using Zoom meetings in the place of in [Read More]
We are all facing a “new normal.” Most of us- over 75%- are working remotely from home trying to adapt very quickly and competently to this “new normal”. We are attempting to keep the same sense of structure and processes that we used in an office setting without much luck. [Read More]
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I started teaching ADR Ethics at USC Gould School of Law last week. During our discussion of ethics, I asked whether it would be proper to hide information. I posed the following hypothetical: At mediation, an Insurance company settled a dog [Read More]
