Mediation On-Line A Newsletter from ADR Resources http://adrr.com/adr9/037.htm Volume 4, No. 2. From: Ethesis@AOL.Com (Ethesis) To: SMarsh@adrr.com Subscribe

Greetings:

I am lucky enough to have an essay by Chris Gilbert who is the ADR co-ordinator for the Dallas District Courts.  It is at http://adrr.com/adr6/headnotes.htm.  She mentions the Collaborative Law Movement -- an anti-mediation movement of sorts as well as providing some other updates on a current mediation program.  I have also posted my notes for my presentation to the Anesthesia program at Texas Wesleyan.  It is at http://adrr.com/smu/health/tw001.htm.

The Recommended Book of the Month:

 This month I recommend The Complete Guide to Mediation:  The Cutting Edge Approach to Family Law Practice by Forrest S. Mosten.  If you are a Family Law section member with the ABA (American Bar Association) the book is available at discount through the ABA (call 1-800-285-2221).  For everyone else, try Barnes & Noble (they have it, with a discount and cheaper shipping).

A warning.  This is a big book.  441 pages, full sized pages (and then some, larger than a normal hardbound or trade paperback book).  Mosten makes good use of every page.  This is the type of book that has a solid index and needs one.

Second warning.  This book is not only for lawyers and contains significant information on how to deal with lawyers if you are a non-lawyer professional who mediates (or for lawyer-mediators for that matter -- being a lawyer doesn't necessarily make it any easier to deal with them).  It also provides guidance for lawyers on how to deal with mediators. Mosten took the "Complete" part of the title seriously, covering everything from getting the right training, the forms you need and how to market yourself.  He explains how to handle multi-session divorce mediation as well as single session work.

Would make a nice book for an academic class.

Interesting new Mediation & ADR web sites

I remain interested in getting referrals to new or important ADR sites.  Please send me the url rather than embedded links so that I can look at the address before having to visit it.  Thanks.

• http://www.apa.org/monitor/phd.html is an excellent article on the basic topic of "truth in advertising" for education (in this case, for Ph.D. programs).
• http://site.www.umb.edu/forum/1/Dispute_Resolution/res/index.htm is the new url for UMass.  It has been hard to find since it moved.  I only kept looking since I really liked the UMass faculty members I've met and was impressed by them.
• mediate.com has gone through a complete redesign and I like it.  Honestly, mediate.com has really become a great place to visit.
• http://www.aom.pace.edu/cmd/ is the web site for the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management.  That is a large academic group, supporting scholarship (it even has an incubator program) with an on-line presence pretty much disconnected from the rest of dispute resolution.  More on that topic below.
• The PhD Project at http://www.phdproject.com/ is useful to anyone who wants to teach ADR in a graduate program (more below).
• http://www.crinfo.org deserves another mention.  They have taken a lot of effort on their search engines and indexes, though I'd like to see a front page that is a little less busy.  The site repays repeat use, so visit it often.
• A jobs link at http://www.aria.org/jobs/jobs.htm might be of interest to some.
• CRInfo has its web boards at http://webboard.mediate.com:80/~CRInfo.  Honestly, I would like to have a discussion with everyone who is running an on-line dispute resolution related bulletin board and have one central group. Just as SPIDR, etc., have merged (and are much stronger for the move), so the various on-line bbs for dispute resolution should merge, rather than trying to keep seperate identities.  This is especially so because many academic users access web sites through shared machines that don't memorize passwords, access names, etc. My nomination for an agreed central location is mediate.com, though I'm curious if anyone has a better idea.  If I get enough feedback on the idea, I'll bring it up with the various bbs providers.
• Frank Hanna, who is deeply involved with the Arizona Dispute Resolution Association, has reworked his site at http://www.mediation-agency.com.  I'm hoping for a report from Frank on how mediation is progressing in Arizona and his experiences with the ADRA.  Frank will be providing some training for several city's community mediation programs (I'll be posting more information when I obtain it, for those of you who are in or near Arizona and would be interested in attending).
• NovaForum.com is a site for a firm of attorneys which deals with Global OnLine Alternative Dispute Resolution (Arbitration). An interesting approach. http://www.novaforum.com/ is the web site.
• There is an interesting article at http://www.portalpoint.com/new_page_2.htm provided as a part of a mediation site that covers Police Mediation among other things.
• www.fomed.org.ar is another Spanish language site in Argentina.  Argentia is a leading force in international and Spanish language mediation.
• North Carolina Business Mediation Service is at www.zerolitigation.com.

Essay/Comment/Employment notes

Right now, an BSRN who decides to go back for a master's in anesthesia can expect to have offers to pay for his or her entire education, a signing bonus and a starting pay of $120,000.00 or more a year.  Compare that to a masters in dispute resolution from most programs.

Speaking of employment in the field, this is a direct quote from someone doing field work in dispute resolution:  "I'm supposed to be in Kalimantan (Borneo) right now, but one of the groups I was to be bringing together began killing members of the other group and carrying their heads around on sticks. We decided to postpone a couple of months."

Educational Programs:

Last month I provided materials and details on starting your own dispute resolution program at a university near where you live.  However, a growing emphasis of many business schools is conflict resolution.  It even has its own section with the Academy of Management.  As I noted, http://www.aom.pace.edu/cmd/ is the web site for the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management.

To teach in one of these programs takes a PhD.  You might think that getting a PhD is beyond your reach, especially if you are a minority or female candidate.  That is not so.  Read the FAQ at http://www.phdproject.com/.  The bottom line is that most PhD programs will pay you somewhere between $1,200.00 and $2,000.00 a month to go to school for a PhD in Business, which takes about three years.  As for placement, read http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/fp/381.htm for a little perspective.  It is an entirely different world than liberal arts.

This raises a couple of thoughts and questions.

First, if you've noticed, in listing ADR programs in higher education, many groups list only law school programs, or list law school, graduate school and undergraduate programs.  I expect to see that three part grouping change to a four part grouping, with business school being the new group.  It may well be that law schools cease to be considered in that focus as well, since even a "top ten" program usually offers only two or three ADR classes.  I'm not sure that outside of law, three classes in an area constitutes teaching it.

Second, it should be interesting to see if any one area begins to dominate ADR at the graduate level.  I found it interesting that the Academy of Management did not include a link to SPIDR in their links section (though I expect that to change). In some ways, business schools are as insular as law schools, in some ways much less.

Third, this presents a third way of entering the teaching end of the field.  I've already addressed teaching ADR in law school and building a program from Continuing/General Education roots.  Building a dispute resolution program from a business school is the next one I will be thinking about.

So, no conclusions, just some thoughts.

News and Book Reviews/Books/Periodicals

I expect to be reviewing a book by Jerome Levy next month and discussing about how his publisher decided to market the book and the dramatic change in sales a single marketing decision made (royalties went up by more than a factor of ten).

Current Issues

I recently was involved (representing a client) in a mediation that was held without a mediator.  The attorneys involved shuttled back and forth instead.  It worked, and I found it interesting.  "mediatorless mediation" is what the attorney on the other side called it when he explained that we were going to do without a mediator in the mediation session we had scheduled.

Submissions to adrr.com

As always, I am interested in any submissions or articles anyone would like to have posted on the web -- and I am glad to be able to point them out in this newsletter.  I prefer to post material as you have written it, with no editorial changes by myself.

With my best regards, I remain,

Sincerely yours,

Stephen Marsh
http://adrr.com/adr9/037.htm
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