Me As A Mediator…
In January, I had the honor of judging a part of a mediation competition for law students in the Western region of the United States. Pairs of students were given a test case to study and then they tasked with trying to mediate an agreement between them and another team.
The experience was a good one for a lot of reasons: One was that the test case given to the mediators was the real case of the Estate of Micheal Chrichton suing the production team for The Pitt. The estate believes that The Pitt is a spin off of ER and that Micheal Chrichton should be given creator credit and the estate should receive monetary compensation because he was the original creator of ER in 1994. The Pitt Producers disagree. I am a huge fan of both shows and it was fascinating to read the legal brief for the case.
The second reason the experience was good was because it was really interesting to see the way the law students formed their arguments and negotiated between themselves using the facts of the case. It was cool to see the way law schools teach mediation as an extension of the law and how formal the teams were with one another as they worked to reach an agreement.
The best part of the experience for me was that I got to see how different my style of mediation is from a typical lawyer led mediation. I saw, in real time, how my own Conflict Resolution and Restorative Justice rooted practice of mediation is relational, and personal, and places a value on working to find a resolution that is fair and that feels as good as it can for everyone involved.
The teams did an excellent job of negotiating, and they were well prepared, but in the end, only one team could prevail and that team has gone onto the national mediation competition! I wish them luck, but I know that they will do a great job. They are fabulous mediators.
They will never know this, but I thank them for helping to affirm what I know about my personal mediation style which is people and relationship centered and can get emotional at times. But that’s okay! I like that style and I like that people trust me enough to let me into their lives and to be honest and raw with me.
It’s why I do what I do.