idealawg

People, Action, Content, or Time: Which is your preferred listening style?

Still another difference between cultures besides those already mentioned: Listening styles. Differences in listening styles also occur within cultures. These differences can create conflict in couples, in the workplace, in mediation, and in professional relationships, including that of attorney and client. Learning one's own preferred style and watching what others prefer can make a big difference in anyone's ability to communicate.

The listening styles I am about to describe were developed by James Weaver, Kittie Watson and Larry Barker. After each style, I have listed a few typical features of each.

The Listening Styles

People

• concerned for the other person’s feelings
• look for interests in common with the other
• likely to become engrossed in the other person’s problems

Action

• want accurate, brief, concise statements (A, B, C statements)
• get impatient with disorganized communication
• prone to finishing the thought of the other person

Content

• want to hear all the facts so can carefully make their own judgments and form their own opinions
• want complete facts, data and evidence so they can evaluate them
• like to solve complicated puzzles with complex pieces

Time

• prefer short, speedy, swift interactions (S, S, S statements)
• will often tell others how much time they have to meet
• if time feels pressing, or the other is taking too much time, may interrupt or look at their watch

You Can Negotiate the Differences in Styles

One problem with listening styles is that people use them out of habit, rather than choice. Even when another style would be more appropriate for the situation, they

"An attorney should advise a client at the outset of the relationship of the availability of [ADR]."

Last summer the California State Bar adopted the CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GUIDELINES OF CIVILITY AND PROFESSIONALISM (pdf) to which I have linked before.

One section of the Guidelines focuses on settlement and alternative dispute resolution.

SECTION 13
SETTLEMENT AND ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION

An attorney should raise and explore with the client and, if the client consents, with opposing counsel, the possibility of settlement and alternative dispute resolution in every matter as soon as possible and, when appropriate, during the course of litigation.

For example:

a. An attorney should advise a client at the outset of the relationship of the availability of informal or alternative dispute resolution.

b. An attorney should attempt to evaluate a matter objectively and to de-escalate any controversy or dispute in an effort to resolve or limit the controversy or dispute.

c. An attorney should consider whether alternative dispute resolution would adequately serve a client’s interest and dispose of the controversy expeditiously and economically.

d. An attorney should honor a client’s desire to settle the dispute quickly and in a cost effective manner.

e. An attorney should use an alternative dispute resolution process for purposes of settlement and not for delay or other improper purposes, such as discovery.

f. An attorney should participate in good faith, and assist the alternative dispute officer by providing pertinent and accurate facts, law theories, opinions and arguments in an attempt to resolve a dispute.

g. An attorney should not falsely hold out the possibility of settlement as a means for terminating discovery or delaying trial.

Hat tip to Nancy Hudgins at Civil Negotiation and Mediation.

"Joining the Law School Rankings Game": DEADWOOD REPORT

In "Joining the Law School Rankings Game" (insidehighered.com), I learned of a new law school ranking entity: the Deadwood Report. Abstract of "Fair Warning to Law Schools ... and an Invitation to 1Ls, 2Ls & 3Ls" (Green Bag):

Aspiring law students and professors should have more and better information about the relative quality of law schools. Unfortunately, the people in the best positions to provide that information - the AALS and ABA - have powerful reasons to avoid doing so. The void has been filled in part by the U.S. News rankings. We could go on about their defects and limitations, but we have done that before. U.S. News could improve its product, but why bother? Doing more and better work would be costly, and in the absence of a genuine competitive threat there is no reason to make the investment. Enter the Deadwood Report, in which the Green Bag will provide rough and admittedly partial but transparent measures of law school faculty quality by measuring teaching, scholarship, and (eventually) service. Law schools generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to working in all three areas. Why? Because - according to the law schools and many leaders of the profession - the best teachers tend to be active scholars, and the best scholars tend to be active teachers, and all the best lawyers of every stripe engage in service for the public good. Evidence of the law schools' commitment to this view is

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Dr. Tammy Lenski is on virtual book tour for her new MAKING MEDIATION YOUR DAY JOB

Lot of excitement over at Tammy Lenski's Mediator Tech. She has released her book Making Mediation Your Day Job: How to Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know. To celebrate the release, she is throwing a Book Launch Virtual Party at which you can enter a drawing to win one of many excellent prizes. Don't wait because the entry deadline is 5PM EST on March 15.

More! Lenski is also on virtual book tour. Of course, that tech-savvy strategy is what we would expect from a "confessed technophile."

“The book tour of today is very different than the book tour of yester-year,” says Lenski. “Today’s book tours tap the power of the Internet and telephone technologies to spread the word and engage readers.” Lenski’s book tour includes complimentary teleconference seminars with ADR associations and groups, blog and Podcast interviews with fellow ADR professionals, and an online prize drawing for mediation marketing services and products relevant to mediators who want to jump-start their practices.

Lenski founded her successful full-time ADR practice a decade ago and built it using the principles and processes she now shares in her book. A core faculty member in Woodbury College’s master’s in mediation program for many years, Lenski has trained and educated hundreds of practicing mediators and seen first-hand what differentiates those who have business success from those who aren’t yet able to make mediation their day job. She blogs about the intersection of ADR, technology and marketing at MediatorTech.com.

Lenski is definitely a guru of ADR marketing. Buy her book and learn from a master. And don't forget to enter that prize drawing at the Book Launch Virtual Party.

"Off course: how the US fell out of love with golf"

Excerpts of "Off course: how the US fell out of love with golf" from The Independent (London):

[T]his is a part of the leisure industry that is in simmering crisis in the US. Year after year, the number of new [golf] players is failing to match the total of those younger participants who give it up or older veterans who retire to the great clubhouse in the sky.

Club owners cannot even agree on why it is happening, let alone what to do about it but many are certain that, without a big makeover, the sport's gentle decline is only set to steepen.
. . .
"The corporate membership business has changed for the simple reason that corporations have changed," muses Walter Hurney, a Long Island golf club owner who is experimenting with new ways to woo a younger generation. "These days, Americans work until they drop, working sometimes 12 hours a day. For a workaholic, the golf

Legal Education at the Crossroads: Request for Proposals

Excerpt:

REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS – DEADLINE MAY 15, 2008

Legal Education at the Crossroads
Ideas to Accomplishments:  Sharing New Ideas for an Integrated Curriculum
Friday, September 5, 5-9 p.m.
Saturday, September 6, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Sunday, September 7, 9 a.m. – noon
University of Washington School of Law, William H. Gates Hall
Seattle, Washington

The University of Washington School of Law requests proposals to participate in a working conference on transforming legal education based on the suggestions in the Carnegie Report, Sullivan, et al., EDUCATING LAWYERS:  PREPARATION FOR THE PROFESSION OF LAW (2007) and supported by the recent study, Stuckey et al., BEST PRACTICES FOR LEGAL EDUCATION (2007). While we will be championing existing transformative efforts, our principal goal is to help participants develop, expand, and assess projects anywhere along the spectrum between ideas and recently-initiated innovations.  Consequently, while participants in the conference will gain a sense of what law schools are already doing to implement the Carnegie and CLEA Reports, participants’ primary benefit will be the opportunity to develop their own ideas as they share and explore those ideas in facilitated groups.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Anyone interested in significant legal education reform should attend, including deans, chairs of curriculum committees, faculty engaged in reform efforts and faculty who hope to initiate reform efforts.  Law schools attending to develop their own ideas for change are encouraged to send two or three representatives.

The rest of the RFP.

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White Shoe, Black Hat: MICHAEL CLAYTON's devastating critique of the legal profession

A review of the movie Michael Clayton was published at Salon.com today. Click to read "White Shoe, Black Hat: Michael Clayton's devastating critique of the legal profession." The article includes commentary on the legal profession, such as:

Whatever the explanation, Michael Clayton offers an only slightly exaggerated portrait of a profession undergoing a kind of slow-motion existential crisis. It does so at a time when in the real world, midlevel associates are dropping out in droves. At Sullivan and Cromwell, where annual associate attrition has reached 30 percent, management recently prevailed on partners to "be sensitive to not canceling associates' vacations." Firms are attempting to accommodate the lifestyles of their employees in a variety of ways, from "kindness committees" to weekly yoga sessions.

Interesting read. Have any of you seen the movie? What did you think?

What's universal about mediation? Confidentiality? Ownership of the dispute? Anything?

The concepts of conflict and resolution vary from culture to culture. Yesterday I posted at Brains On Purpose™ about cross-cultural conflict resolution and some ways to assess cultural differences. Almost exactly a year ago, I posted here at idealawg on cross-cultural awareness and how easy it is for us to make assumptions about what might be universal. I believe that as the world becomes more global, cultural awareness becomes increasingly important.

In last year's post, I linked to an article about a seminar I presented to a group of lawyer mediators on the topic of cross-cultural mediation. In the article, I discuss four questions people who are culturally sensitive can answer with deep self-awareness, as well as with knowledge about such things as: cultural influence on the mind, attribution theory, self-fulfilling prophecy, one's personal comfort zone, reasons for resistance to change, stereotyping, confirmation bias, and in-group/out-group.

Those questions are:

• What is your own personal heritage?
• What is your comfort level with people who are culturally different?
• How much do you know about the tendencies of your own mind?
• Do you know that the ways of your own culture are not universal?

I have learned that those questions are revisited and the responses modified as we become more culturally sensitive. In the beginning, they sound easy.

I ended the article with some assumptions mediators might have and why, with some cultures, the assumptions would need to be questioned. An excerpt:

As we learn more about culture, we will continue to be surprised at what we thought was universal and in fact is not.  . . .

For example, in many other cultures:

• Confidentiality would not make sense;
• Ownership of the dispute (and the responsibility to resolve it) would not belong to the individual;
• Insight about how the problem came about would not be valued (this is especially surprising for those mediators with a therapeutic bent to their model of mediation);
• Self-disclosure or discussing feelings would be inappropriate (particularly surprising for that same group of mediators).

The more we learn to question our assumptions about what is universal, the more culturally sensitive we can become.

Please let me know what you believe is universal about mediation. I want to hear from you.

"If I had two billion dollars" from Law21: Dispatches from a legal profession on the brink

Excerpt from Jordan Furlong's post If I had two billion dollars:

There is persuasive authority for the proposition that if I had a million dollars, I’d buy your love. So what would I be able to buy with two billion dollars? Apparently, a whole lot of wide-eyed attention and breathless commentary from various legal media outlets. That’s pretty much all I’ve seen over the last few days after Latham & Watkins, DLA Piper and Skadden Arps each announced that it had broken the $2 billion revenue barrier in 2007.

Now, if this is the sort of thing you like, then the foregoing links will give you more than enough to pass the weekend, what with the debates over total firm revenue versus profit per partner versus profit per equity partner, each metric relatively able or unable to determine the richest and/or most profitable large law firm in the world. For myself, I’d like to step back here and suggest that the more we obsess

My page 123 - From _Bringing Peace Into the Room: How the Personal Qualities of the Mediator Impact the Process of Conflict Resolution_

From David Maister's blog, Coert Visser at Solution Focused Change picked up a meme he chose to pass on to me. Maister quotes Michel-Adrien Sheppard from slaw.ca:

Well, there is a new meme zipping around the Net: open the nearest book to page 123, go down to the 5th sentence and type up the 3 following sentences. Then, pass the message along to other people you want to invite to contribute to the game.

Maister adds:

I don't want to obligate others, but it sounded fun so here goes:

His quote is from EPIC CHANGE: How to Lead Change in the Global Age. This meme does sound like fun. My contribution is from an oldie but goodie that I am rereading: Bringing Peace Into the Room: How the Personal Qualities of the Mediator Impact the Process of Conflict Resolution.

As the mediator imparts some of his or her own negotiation skills, the parties' style of negotiation is modified from a simplistic offer-counteroffer format into a more sophisticated interactive negotiation format. The parties are shifted from thinking in terms of static, hard-and-fast positions to thinking dynamically in terms of multiple options. The parties learn to question and consider what pieces of each other's interests they might accommodate to obtain what they themselves need (Benjamin, 2002).

If you want to tell us what happens when you apply this process to the book nearest you, either do so in the comments below or blog your three sentences.

Is this kind of like reading tea leaves? I must say it was fun to turn the pages and count the sentences and  discover what appeared.