Recently I had the great pleasure of teaming up with friend and colleague Tammy Lenski to deliver a workshop at the Annual Conference for the Association for Conflict Resolution’s New England Chapter.

Our workshop was designed to introduce mediators, arbitrators, and others in the conflict resolution field to digital tools for managing, marketing, and delivering services in an ADR practice.

Tammy and I selected our favorite tools and put them together in a handbook for workshop participants. We had three criteria for selecting the tools that made it into this handbook: 1) ease of use; 2) no special tech skills or knowledge required; and 3) free or affordable.

We realized though that this stuff was too good to keep to ourselves and the people who came to our workshop–so we decided to share it with the web-surfing world. In PDF format for you to download is ADR in the 21st Century: Easy Tech Tools to Market and Manage Your Practice.

Tammy and I hope that you find it useful. And if you have your own favorite digital tools that make your life as a mediator easier, please let me know.

The latest addition to the World Directory of ADR Blogs is Tar Heel Mediator, published by North Carolina attorney William B. Wallace. I’m going to let Will introduce himself and his blog:

Tar Heel Mediator is a blog devoted to mediation and other forms of ADR from the perspective of a reforming litigation attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina. The blog will touch on developments in ADR specific to North Carolina and beyond, hopefully in an entertaining fashion. I also hope to provide a lay person who visits the site with some guidance as to how ADR works, and why it can work for them.

Check out Will’s most recent post, “Lobbing missiles at mediation“, which not only invites mediators to share their strategies for handling posturing parties at the negotiation table but also irresistibly invokes Monty Python’s The Holy Grail.

(Speaking of Monty Python, in my opinion the haggling scene from Life of Brian may be one of the funniest cinematic depictions of negotiation ever. If any of you have a favorite negotiation scene from either television or film, tell us all in a comment to this post.)

Congratulations on the launch of your new blog, Will!