About Anthony

His Mediation Philosophy

As serious as I am about my work, colleagues have always known me to have a smile on my face or to be laughing. That’s the mindset I bring to the mediation process—even though we will have to have some serious and difficult conversations, I never want the process to be more stressful than it needs to be.

What do you believe are the best practices for preparing for a mediation session? What advice would you give to someone on how to prepare for mediation?

I think the three most important practices any attorney can have in preparing for mediation are:

1. Be ready to highlight the most critical pieces of evidence supporting their client’s claims or defenses, and have thorough, reasonable responses to the most damaging pieces of evidence that have been discovered so far. When one side is prepared in that regard, and the other side isn’t, it makes it incredibly difficult for me, as the mediator, to credibly assert evidentiary leverage for the party that isn’t as prepared.

2. Be able to fully support, on the plaintiff’s side, the calculation of damages and overall case valuation, and on the defendant’s side, being able to offer a realistic and reasonable alternative calculation of damages and overall case valuation. So many mediations get bogged down in disputes over case valuation because specific calculations weren’t done in advance.

3. Manage client expectations going into mediation, and let me know in advance how I might best be able to help you in making your client understand the benefits of settlement versus the risks of proceeding to trial, once presented with a reasonable offer to settle.

For mediations involving cases in which the trial date is fast approaching, I would also add that another best practice for attorneys is making sure that all necessary depositions have been taken (or at least noticed), such that the other side understands that you’re fully prepared to proceed to trial. I have mediated many cases in which one attorney isn’t convinced that the other side will really proceed to trial because they haven’t taken depositions of key witnesses, or haven’t taken any depositions at all, and that factors significantly in the negotiating posture of that party.

How do you personally approach building trust and rapport with the people you mediate with?

The most important thing you can do to build trust and rapport with litigants and their counsel is to be yourself, be honest, be humble, and be down-to-earth. Also, while some cases are a lot more serious than others, which might require a different type of decorum, I often rely on my sense of humor to keep a light atmosphere to the mediation process. I have found it much easier to build trust and rapport when the participants aren’t made to feel so uptight.

What’s one of the most valuable lessons you have learned through mediation/being a mediator?

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a mediator these past few years is that no matter how badly you want the parties to a dispute to settle, the parties have to want it more than you do. Mediators often feel immense guilt about cases not settling, and like many of my colleagues, I’ve been known to follow up persistently with attorneys, even for numerous months, hoping to still help the parties reach a settlement after mediation.

At the end of the day, though, what I’ve learned is that the best thing we can do for parties is to get them the best possible option to resolve their case without further litigation and going to trial, and then they are ultimately the ones that have to decide to avail themselves of that option. If you’ve truly helped the parties make progress and obtain the best possible option for settlement, then you’ve done your job and you can’t force a settlement to happen. Once I learned to accept that, it helped me focus more on the process and less on the outcome.