The latest edition of The Complete Lawyer is now available, putting the focus on “Doing Business Internationally.” The Complete Lawyer is a web-based magazine focusing on quality of life and career satisfaction for attorneys but with relevance for dispute resolution professionals as well. It features a regular ADR column, “The Human Factor“, which explores ADR from the perspective of four attorneys who mediate – me and three colleagues, Stephanie West Allen of Idealawg and Brains on Purpose, Gini Nelson of Engaging Conflicts, and Victoria Pynchon of Settle It Now Negotiation Blog . The four of us alternate as writers.
It’s my turn this month with this particular installment of “The Human Factor”, where I invite readers to “Master the Geography of Collaboration.
The Complete Lawyer is published by Don Hutcheson, a good friend to the four of us and an enthusiastic supporter of “The Human Factor”. Thanks, Don, as always for your encouragement — we are all deeply grateful.
Since 2006, a group of mediators in Massachusetts, designating itself the MassUMA Working Group, has met regularly to discuss the adoption of the Uniform Mediation Act (“UMA”) in the Commonwealth.
The UMA protects communications made during a mediation and establishes a limited evidentiary privilege that prevents the use of those communications in subsequent legal proceedings. The UMA could replace the current law in Massachusetts, M.G.L. ch. 233, § 23C.
During the course of two years, the MassUMA Working Group through the efforts of its subcommittees has produced recommendations and most recently an amended version of the UMA for consideration and public commenting.
The Working Group has scheduled the following public meetings to provide information about the UMA and invite input from mediators and the general public:
- Friday, November 21, 2:00 – 4:15 p.m., Fehlow Room, Main Library, 132 South Street, Plymouth, MA
- Monday, November 24, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m., Greenfield Community College (downtown campus), Greenfield, MA
(FYI, I’ll be facilitating the meeting on November 24 in Greenfield.)
In addition, two meetings of the MassUMA Working Group, also open to the public, will be held on the following dates:
- Thursday, December 4, 2008, 3-5 p.m.
- Tuesday, December 16, 2008, 2-5 p.m.
These meetings will take place at the offices of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services, 99 Summer Street, Boston, MA. If you cannot attend in person, you can still participate by phone by calling 712-429-0690, enter access code 317609 and wait for other participants.
The public (that’s you) is strongly encouraged to comment online on the amended version of the Uniform Mediation Act proposed by the MassUMA Working Group, known as the UMA One Text.
If you’re interested in my two cents, you can read my objections to the amended version in an article I posted a year ago, “In weighing the Uniform Mediation Act, Massachusetts mediators may be poised to repeat mistakes of the past. I’m planning to revisit and refine those objections in an upcoming post soon.
Last week, legal marketing guru Larry Bodine put his foot in it with a blog post describing the “Best ‘Elevator Pitch’ Ever…?”, courtesy of a “silver-haired senior-most litigator” who relies on a cheap joke about the Holocaust to woo business clients.
Bodine’s readers responded with outrage, and, to his credit, Bodine deleted the post from his blog and offered an apology that mediator Victoria Pynchon has described as “heart-felt”:
I sincerely apologize for the crude and offensive “Elevator Pitch” post I put online last week. In the clear light of morning, it is clear that it was anti-Semitic and repellent. I want to thank all the people who commented and called me about it; I listened and took what you said to heart.
I have deleted the post. It was a mistake to repeat a crude joke that I heard in rural Illinois, and I should have known better. It was a worse mistake to say it was the “best” of its kind, when actually it was hideous.
Curiously, at Legal Blog Watch, a well regarded blogger approvingly repeated Bodine’s anecdote in a post captioned “Great Elevator Pitch for Lawyers“. Quickly realizing her error, and showing true character and class, she amended her post to apologize sincerely for her mistake:
Law firm public relations expert Rich Klein makes the important point at his blog that an elevator speech making light of the Holocaust is offensive. Klein is right and I apologize to anyone whom this post may have offended.
Although Bodine’s apology has earned the praise of some, not everyone was willing to let him off the hook so easily, including one blogger from a family of Holocaust survivors.
But what interests me about this whole event is not so much the apologies that resulted, or their acceptance or rejection. Instead, I wonder how it is that two people, one who recounted the anecdote and one who repeated it, missed its offensiveness the first time around. That they did is a lesson in humility for all of us.
In a post published in The Situationist in the aftermath of the Don Imus firing last year, authors Jon Hanson and Michael McCann mused,
…the stereotypes that we purport to abhor when articulated explicitly reside within most of us unexamined and unchallenged, sometimes wielding influence on our cognitions and behavior. We are, in a way, all carriers of the same virus…
What happened to these two bloggers could happen to you or me. We, too, are susceptible; it is all too easy for any of us to err. Without warning, we can all be deaf to the import of our words, blind to their effect. In the end, we can only learn from incidents like these. As James Joyce wrote, “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” Experiences such as these can build our immunity to the viruses within us. And healing will come — through prevention and, yes, through apologies.
