News & Archive

How to Improve Mediation Quality and Increase Lawyers' Use of Interest-Based Negotiation based on Empirical Research Findings

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
8:30-10:00 A.M. (Continental Breakfast at 8:00)
Harvard Law School
John Chipman Gray Room, 2nd Floor, Pound Hall
(click for map)

Professor Lande will present results from two recent studies relevant to mediators and lawyers. As a member of the Task Force on Improving Mediation Quality of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution, he designed and analyzed research eliciting civil lawyers’ and mediators’ views about what makes for good and bad mediation. He also conducted a study of “Cooperative” Lawyers in Wisconsin, which described why they offer this distinct form of practice in addition to traditional litigation and Collaborative Law representation. He will offer practical suggestions for mediators and lawyers based on these studies.

John Lande is Director of the LLM Program in Dispute Resolution and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law. He began mediating professionally in 1982 in California.  He received his J.D. from Hastings College of Law and Ph.D in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School in 1994-95. 

His work focuses on various aspects of dispute systems design, including publications analyzing how lawyering and mediation practices will transform each other, business lawyers’ and executives’ opinions about litigation and ADR, court-connected mediation program design, improvement of the quality of mediation practice, the “vanishing trial,” and Cooperative and Collaborative law. The CPR Institute gave him its award for best professional article in 2007 for “Principles for Policymaking about Collaborative Law and Other ADR Processes,” 22 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 619 (2007).

Please RSVP to swhitman@law.harvard.edu.