Philosophy

There is no better illustration of Max Lucado’s statement than when contentious litigation can be resolved through mediation or arbitration. For 23 years as a litigator, I defended and prosecuted a wide variety of cases, and candidly, I enjoyed the thrill, the challenge, and the strategy of engaging in “combat.” For my clients, however, the adversarial process of litigation was generally stressful, uncertain, and difficult. Conversely, the ability to control their fate and achieve a settlement through a communicative process with a neutral mediator always presented as the better alternative to resolving conflict.

As a mediator, I am acutely aware of the fact that we, as thoughtful, intelligent humans, would never outsource or delegate the critical decisions in our life to a small group of strangers. (For example, we would never arbitrarily select six people we didn’t know to make final decisions about our health, finances, parenting, or business affairs!) But that is exactly what litigants are asked to do if they proceed to trial and place the fate of an important, often life-changing dispute into the hands of unknown jurors.

The initials at the front of EMC Mediation Solutions stand for this: Every. Matter. Counts. It means that regardless of the monetary value or perceived ‘size’ of a case, I am profoundly aware that it may be the most important matter in a litigant’s life at that time. My philosophy is to listen to the parties, assess and highlight all possible outcomes of prolonged litigation (the good and the bad), and forge a path to common ground where the parties are empowered to control the result. The goal is to demonstrate how combat is optional, but certainly not optimal.