0183 - The Middle Path: Melding Advocacy and Mediation
Course Description
About the Panel
Diligent advocacy is absolutely essential in our work as lawyers. Yet advocacy inevitably elicits counteradvocacy, in a reactive cycle that can protract the process of adjudicating disputes and burden settlement negotiations. When mediation devolves into primary transmitting offers and demands, we sacrifice both the utility of advocacy in sharpening appreciation of risks, as well as the opportunity to mitigate the friction-loss of reactivity. This virtual panel will explore a version of mediation designed to capture the benefits of advocacy while redirecting the dialectic of the adversarial process into an evaluative dialogue on risks and options. Our panel brings decades of real-world pragmatism to the conversation.
Panelists
Will Weinstein has taught Ethics courses at UH, is presently teaching at San Francisco State University and has given seminars on the subject at prominent universities in Australia, the University of New Mexico, and at the Executive MBA program at Golden Gate University. He has also been active in the financial services business for over forty years. He was Governor of the American Stock Exchange for five years and currently serves as a Financial and Investment Advisor and Money Manager to individuals and corporations active in the equity markets.
Antonio Piazza pioneered the development of mediated negotiations as the preferred alternative to protracted conflict in complex civil disputes, having successfully mediated the resolution of four thousand cases since 1981. These have included some of the most complex, high stakes and high-profile disputes in the commercial world- long believed to be intractable. They have involved the world’s preeminent companies, business leaders, and law firms, millions to billions of dollars, and have routinely reached resolution in a single day of mediated negotiation. Individual settlements have exceeded one billion dollars.