Category Archives: Uncategorized

2023 Nanci Klein Award from the ADR Section

I was honored this week to receive the Nanci S. Klein Award from the ADR Section of the State Bar of Michigan. Nanci Klein was an early ADR leader in Michigan who devoted her considerable talents to the Community Dispute Resolution Program (CDRP), including leading Michigan’s largest CDRP provider, the Oakland Mediation Center, for ten […]

Disclosure Could Become Mandatory

In response to a growing scandal, the state of California is considering mandatory disclosure of past relationships by mediators and arbitrators. The scandal involves a Los Angeles attorney named Tom Girardi who worked for years with “private judges” in administering mass tort cases while diverting funds to himself. An LA Times investigation suggests millions of […]

Free At Last: Expungement

Free at last! Jesus frees us from the guilt and shame of our sin, but only the state can free us of a criminal conviction. The process is called expungement, and I had the privilege yesterday of seeing a friend’s conviction expunged. Like so many of us, she “did something stupid” long ago, and she […]

Online Dispute Resolution: Is It Working?

Michigan was one of the few states that was ahead of the curve when the lockdown began, because it had already implemented an online dispute resolution (“ODR”) process and trained mediators to mediate these cases in a chatroom-like mode — asynchronous, no cameras required. A good example of a court ODR system is the program […]

Case Evaluation is Changing

The Michigan Supreme Court has adopted changes to the case evaluation process, over strong dissent. Case evaluation is a settlement technique, perhaps unique to Michigan, where attorneys present summaries of their case to a panel of three disinterested attorneys who come up with a number (“award”) representing the panel’s determination of the case’s worth. That […]