Chick Nation – Men Under Attack: Women Now Dominate Amateur Sports

One of the best things that has happened to my professional life has been the growing number of female attorneys. They have made up more than 50% of law students nationwide for some time now. Study after study has shown that once women make up a certain number or percentage of the attorneys in a decision-making body, the group as a whole becomes increasingly collaborative. This is one of the arguments that was made in favor of adding a third Supreme Court justice.

Obviously, not all women have a collaborative nature. Probably the finest young litigator in our firm is a female attorney with about 12 years of experience. She goes for her opponent's jugular with the same degree of fervor and tenacity as the finest male litigators I have observed. With another 5-10 years of experience in major litigation, we will have to send an associate with a mop and a bucket to her trials so we can clean up the area where her opponents sat.

Part of my practice for some time has been a collaborative process called mediation. I worked with a group of about 6-7 other mediators for several years. We tracked our cases and discovered that 75-80% of the disputes that we mediated resulted in out-of-court settlement. This saved the parties literally millions of dollars in attorney fees and court costs and saved thousands of hours of the courts' time, thereby speeding up the processing of those disputes for which mediation is not an option (at least to this point, we have not found a way to mediate a murder charge, for example). The parties that settle via mediation are nearly always far more satisfied with the results than they are with a judge's order. In my opinion this is because the collaborative process allows the parties themselves to work with each other toward an acceptable solution rather than having a solution imposed upon them from outside the dispute.

Further, the solution quite often is a more personally satisfying one. When the parties speak to each other instead of to the judge, each is far more able to understand the motivations of the other. I have had a number of disputes resolved for a small fraction of the amount at issue so long as the injured party feels that he or she has been heard, their feelings acknowledged by the other party. I had one party reduce the amount for which she was asking by $50,000 simply because the other party apologized during the course of the mediation.

The development of such Alternative Dispute Resolution processes has been largely driven by female attorneys and judges. Males (especially judges) are coming on board in increasing numbers, but far more often than not the mediation programs that exist in cities across the country were created or otherwise initiated by female lawyers. While it does not receive a lot of press, I think it is one of the most exciting developments in our incredibly litigious society in many years.