Arbitrators, mediators, lawyers, ADR trainers and professors have many excellent guides to assist them in doing their job. But what about the guy inside the company who has a cross-border dispute on his hands and needs to deal with it with intelligence, elegance and efficiency? Or at least not flub it? Two deeply experienced lawyers have come to the rescue.
James F. Ring and some colleagues gave a fascinating talk at the recent ABA Dispute Resolution Section on Game Theory. Where it started was cutting a cake. Where it ended was cutting out the lawyers, at least by implication.
In addition to his law practice, Mr. Ring runs an enterprise called Fair Outcomes, Inc. His talk was not so much a “sell job” for his company as it was a discourse on the reasons why conventional approaches to negotiation may have serious limitations.
The ABA Section of Business Law meets in Denver, Colorado, April 22-24, 2010. Among many great topics to be addressed this year, the Section’s Dispute Resolution Committee is offering a power-packed panel titled “Is Arbitration Broken? And Can It Be Fixed?”
Frederic Luskin, Director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, reminded a packed house at the ABA Dispute Resolution meeting in San Francisco that a 2-yr old who is told “no” screams and yells when she doesn’t get what she wants, but then eventually stops and moves on to the next thing. By contrast, a 40-year old who doesn’t get what he wants can persist in expressing his anger and indignation for many, many years; in some cases, he will never stop. In this lies the attraction, for some, of the American civil judicial system.
Dispute resolution professionals often encounter people whose wound has morphed into an attribute of their very life. Who they are is fundamentally tied with the claim. They are no longer wife or butcher or brother or son; they are The One Who Was Wrongly Dealt With. Dr. Luskin asked us whether we might consider not just helping that person to ”resolve” the dispute, but facilitating the removal of the conflict as a central mechanism of the relationship. Might we help to guide wounded people past their wound? Read more »
