
When I meet people attending a mediation for the first time, I’m always interested in finding out what they expect will happen. Often they don’t know much about the process, and sometimes they come in expecting something quite different from what I have in mind. For those people, and even for those who have participated in mediations previously, I sometimes describe various approaches to conducting mediations. I usually have an idea about how I want to proceed, but I try to remain open-minded about what will work. I learned the Pepperdine five stage approach to mediation quite a while back (convening, opening, communicating, negotiating, closing), but that framework doesn’t fully answer some much more basic questions that I think about […]