Resources / Study / Innovation for Court ADR

Just Court ADR

The blog of Resolution Systems Institute

Author Archive

Lawyers Overconfident about Outcomes

Susan M. Yates, May 24th, 2010

An interesting study written up in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law found that lawyers are not good at predicting case outcomes. They tend to be overconfident in predicting how cases will turn out and, even when considering how their cases went in retrospect, they think they turned out better than they did.

Lawyer overconfidence may not seem like news, but whether lawyers have an accurate sense of how their cases will turn out determines how they handle the case, what resources are used, and eventually how satisfied their clients are with their lawyers and the judicial system. So, while it is not news, the question of what to do about it is worth considering.

Interestingly, this propensity to be overconfident does not vary based on years of experience of the lawyer. (more…)

“Nudge”

Susan M. Yates, May 17th, 2010

I have started reading “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of University of Chicago. While I don’t know yet what I will think of all their ideas, they have captivated me with some already. Their discussion of “choice architects,” people who have the “responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions,” immediately got me thinking about how court ADR programs are designed, particularly decisions about referrals.

The authors describe the example of choice architects in a cafeteria putting salad and fruit at the beginning of the food line to promote healthy eating as a form of “libertarian paternalism,” a phrase they distinguish from the popular meanings of either word. (more…)

Video Games and Learning to Mediate

Susan M. Yates, May 4th, 2010

Many years ago a colleague described learning to mediate as being like trying to watch two different TV screens with different shows on them, and learning to meld them into one. On one screen was the story and facts of the case itself and on the other was the mediation process and all its related skills and strategies. The trick was to learn how to braid the two aspects into one flowing mediation. For a long time I liked and used that metaphor when talking with new mediators.

This weekend, I had an experience that replaced, or at least augmented, the TV metaphor. My teenage son tried to teach me to play one of his online video games. (more…)

Dialogue & Deliberation

Susan M. Yates, April 30th, 2010

As we in court ADR continue to define what mediation, arbitration and other processes are, it might do us well to look at others who are defining processes. This came to mind when I was checking out the web site of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, www.NCDD.org. Their introduction to the “streams” and processes of dialogue and deliberation contains almost 20 processes in the four streams: exploration, conflict transformation, decision-making, and collaborative action.

I’m not suggesting that most of these are the types of processes to which courts are going to refer litigants, but there are approaches that courts and their kin (mediation centers, bar associations, etc.) might think about using when designing and reviewing court ADR programs. A fresh approach might be just what is needed to think outside the box about ADR as it becomes increasingly institutionalized.

Verified by ExactMetrics