God, grant me the Serenity To accept the things I cannot change... Courage to change the things I can, And Wisdom to know the difference. (The Serenity Prayer) Several years ago, when my mother had severe dementia and was extremely ornery and contrary, my sister suggested that I read and remember the Serenity Prayer. I [...]
Several times in the past, I have discussed the need for each party to prepare for mediation for it to be successful. As you may guess, I return to this topic again because I just conducted a mediation that went nowhere fast because plaintiff was not prepared. It truly did not know what it wanted [...]
As some of you may recall, the California Law Revision Commission issued its Tentative Recommendation late last year to create an exception to mediation confidentiality. However, the proposed statute could not find a sponsor and so never got introduced into the legislature. Instead, Senator Wieckowski introduced SB 954 on January 30, 2018 which would add [...]
Once again, I return to the subject of “fake news”; this time because of a recent study just published in Science on March 8, 2108. The study- conducted by 3 MIT scholars- Soroush Vosough, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral – found that “… false news spreads more rapidly on the social network Twitter than real [...]
Lawsuits are often about money. And the plaintiff often thinks that if she wins and gets all this money- she will be quite happy. And conversely, a defendant thinks that if she wins, she will save a whole lot of money which will make her happy! Well… as one might suspect, these aspirations are not [...]
In the spring of 2013, the California Law Revision Commission began its study K-402- on creating an exception to mediation confidentiality for attorney malpractice and other attorney misconduct. In June 2017, it issued its Tentative Recommendation which I have extensively discussed in previous blogs. Although, the opposition to the Tentative Recommendation was overwhelming , the [...]
Lawsuits are products. I know this sounds strange particularly to lawyers who after four years of college, three years of law school and then one or more bar examinations, do not want to consider themselves mere sales people (like the used car sales person?) but that is what we are: sales people. We are selling/ [...]
An article last month in the New York Times got me thinking that perhaps in my mediations, I should warn people that their memories and perceptions may be unreliable, especially where the situation involves parties of different ethnicities. In To Curb Bad Verdicts, Court Adds Lesson on Racial Bias for Juries, Ashley Southall (December 15, [...]