A front-page story in our local paper yesterday reported that a former professional football player has sued the NFL Players Association and his former football team for non-payment of a pension to which he believes he is entitled (\u201cEx-football player says union owes him,\u201d Grand Rapids Press, July 7, 2010, page 1). So I find myself once again intrigued by the mediation potential of a sports story.
\nThe plaintiff is not justifying the lawsuit based on entitlement or on violation of legal rights. Instead, he said he was forced to file the lawsuit because, \u201cWe just can\u2019t get anyone to return an email or a letter.\u201d His lawyer agreed that they filed the lawsuit to get a response: \u201cYou just can\u2019t get the NFLPA to respond to this stuff. We were forced to do this because no one would respond to this. Trust me, suing the players\u2019 union and an NFL team is something I did not want to do.\u201d
\nWhat they DO want to do, according to the lawyer, is \u201call sit down and resolve this thing.\u201d That sounds like they want to negotiate\u2013 but when there has been a history of non-communication between parties, it\u2019s unlikely that one-on-one negotiations would be fruitful, and that\u2019s where mediation can help.
\nSo why can\u2019t they just \u201csit down and resolve this\u201d? This case illustrates an advantage of litigation: it more or less forces the other party to participate in the process. A party can choose not to participate in a negotiation or mediation, and there\u2019s not much the other side can do about it. But a defendant \u2013the recipient of a legal complaint–who chooses not to participate in a lawsuit will lose by default, so whether a defendant wants to participate or not, a defendant is engaged.
\nSince this case is filed in Kent County Circuit Court, it will likely get ordered into mediation, where the plaintiff can finally have his chance to \u201csit down\u201d and try to resolve the matter. In fact, this case is probably not simply the communication problem plaintiff portrays it to be. The defendants may say that they did respond, and their answer was \u201cno.\u201d Is the plaintiff saying he got no response, or that he didn\u2019t get the response he wanted? Mediation offers the chance to explore the underlying interests that motivate parties to sue. For example, in this case it sounds like the plaintiff feels disrespected (\u201cto get ignored like that, it\u2019s pretty insulting\u201d), so the settlement might include an apology or other recognition of the plaintiff\u2019s value, in addition to some monetary compensation. In fact, wise defendants know that a sincere apology may reduce the payment needed to settle the case\u2026but that\u2019s the topic of another posting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A front-page story in our local paper yesterday reported that a former professional football player has sued the NFL Players Association and his former football team for non-payment of a pension to which he believes he is entitled (\u201cEx-football player says union owes him,\u201d Grand Rapids Press, July 7, 2010, page 1). So I find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}