Dignity & Respect in Mediation
This post has been viewed 2,789 times.
My view, as I close in on 3,000 mediations conducted, is that nothing is more important to my work as a commercial mediator than the linked concepts of dignity and respect. Respect is what I do (or, sadly, sometimes don’t do) to others. Dignity is the sense of well-being that others have as a result of being treated with respect.
In previous posts I have described how, for me, mediation is all about parties making “good decisions, all things considered”. In my experience, it is unrealistic to expect a person to make a good decision if their dignity is in tatters. I well-remember an early mediation I conducted more than a decade and a half ago in which a female personal injury claimant with an “interesting” personal history was lectured for twenty minutes by defence counsel, going through each and every element of her checkered history and speculating how that would be viewed by the jury hearing the case. By the time we got to caucus she was emotionally distraught, crying out to me, “He’s treating me like trailer park trash!”
No settlement that day, or many other days like it, when a participant in mediation, be it lawyer or client, felt it necessary to demonstrate just how much they disrespected someone else involved in the process.
Read original articleTags: Dignity & Respect, Mediation
