Monthly Archives: March 2009

Voodoo economics: seeking psychic advice for financial decision making

fortune tellingPick up a newspaper these days or tune in to your local TV news station, and there it is — another story about the consequences of bad decision making.

Meanwhile, publishers fill bookstore shelves with texts prescribing remedies for poor judgment, warning us that we are predictably irrational or nudging readers toward wiser choices, while excellent sources online abound, inviting us to examine the forces that influence our conduct or shape our assumptions.

Human nature, however, seems to resist mightily these efforts to improve decision making, despite the daily reminders of the risks of bad judgment. Concerned about uncertainty in their financial futures, some people these days are seeking advice — not from accountants, financial planners, tax attorneys, career coaches, or credit counselors — but from psychics.

Are you making decisions based on magical thinking or wishful predictions about the future? Or on sound advice from knowledgeable experts, information from trustworthy sources, and good common sense?

What old-school trial lawyers really think about mediators

what trial lawyers think of mediatorsThe latest issue of the ABA Journal, the monthly magazine of the American Bar Association, just arrived in my mailbox. The cover story profiles “Lions of the Trial Bar” — attorneys over the age of 70 who have indelibly left their mark on the American legal system.

Conjuring up the acrid smell of cigar smoke and the clink of glasses filled with single barrel bourbon, the article pays nostalgic tribute to the heyday of the trial lawyer — the palmy days before trials started vanishing (and, judging from the photos of those featured, before women and people of color were better represented at the bar).

Here’s what one of these old lions had to say about mediation, which I present to you in all its unexpurgated glory:

They’ve invented this new term, litigator. What the fuck is a litigator? I’m a trial lawyer. I try cases. There are some lawyers who do nothing but this mediation bullshit. Do you know what the root of mediation is? Mediocrity!

And as for ADR generally?

The move to replace jury trials with mediation and arbitration, he says, is actually an effort by elitists in our society to control how disputes are decided.