As a former litigation lawyer, in-house litigation manager and mediation professor, I’ve come to appreciate how learning basic mediation skills can significantly improve an attorney’s overall legal skills. Like most of my colleagues, I was trained in the adversarial system of justice and believed that to be a “zealous advocate,” my role was to fight for my clients’ rights. After a career at a company where I often saw that legal problems were not the only important issues in a dispute, I now embrace the notion that understanding commercial, emotional and communication issues that typically surround business disputes is the key to resolving legal disputes.
Mediation training is multidisciplinary, borrowing from the fields of psychology, sociology, economics and neuroscience. It provides the perfect roadmap to becoming a more effective and, more important, a client-centered, advocate. Just as the medical profession began shifting its focus in the 1980s to training doctors to become more “patient-centered,” the legal profession should begin to emphasize “soft skills” that focus on a more holistic approach to client interests and needs. These conflict-management skills include listening, communicating, searching for prevention-based solutions, exploring common ground and establishing trust.
