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Learning From Law Firms: Using Co-Mediation to Train New Mediators - Chapter 28 - AAA Handbook on Mediation - Third Edition

Author(s): 
Lee A. Rosengard
Page Count: 
7 pages
Published: 
April, 2016
Practice Areas: 
Dispute Resolution & Litigation,
ADR,
Mediation,
Mediators
Author Detail: 

Lee A. Rosengard is a Senior Partner in the Philadelphia-based Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young, LLP. The firm’s General Counsel and a former chair of the firm’s Litigation Department, he currently serves as Chair of its ADR Practice Group.  Mr. Rosengard is a lecturer in law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he teaches Introduction to U.S. Law and Legal Methods, and at Villanova University School of Law, where he teaches Interviewing and Counseling. He is a CPR Institute Distinguished Neutral, a member of the AAA Commercial Panel, and former chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association ADR Committee.  This chapter was adapted from an article that appeared in Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation. Copyright © 2003 CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley Inc.  The author would like to thank Andrew J. Voystock for his invaluable assistance in the 2015 revision of this chapter.

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Description: 

Originally from:

AAA Handbook on Mediation - Third Edition

LEARNING FROM LAW FIRMS: USING CO-MEDIATION TO TRAIN NEW MEDIATORS

Lee A. Rosengard*

I. Introduction

The teaching of alternative dispute resolution as a discipline is flourishing in law schools. ,  Some law schools have institutes that provide training in dispute resolution theory and skills to lawyers and other professionals; some offer certificate programs, advanced degrees and CLE (continuing legal education) credit. 

Frank Sanders of Harvard law School once noted, “the only curricular offerings related to any dispute resolution process other than litigation tended to deal solely with arbitration, and those were often limited to labor arbitration.”  We have come a long way since then.

However, for the same reasons that taking law school courses do not make a law student into a lawyer, the study of ADR as a law school discipline, even to the extent that it includes a clinical component, does not make a law student a mediator.

Few, if any, clients would want their case to be handled by a lawyer who just graduated from law school (as few would want a newly minted doctor to perform surgery on them). Clients want good judgment from their lawyers, and that comes with time and experience. Similarly, few parties would trust their dispute to be mediated by a person with little or no mediation experience.