Mediation and Lawyers

One of the topics of conversation at dinner last night was the extent to which lawyers are a “problem” in the ADR community. In the U.S., the legal community came to the party reasonably late (although they are making up for lost time). I once joked that as soon as lawyers learned how to bill for ADR work, they would take over the mediation world – not quite, but the impulse is there. At this point, however, the legal community and the ADR community at large have a reasonably peaceful relationship in the U.S. – the ABA even lets me belong to the Section of Dispute Resolution (the fastest growing section in the ABA), even though I am not a lawyer.

In Argentina, the situation is very different – the legal community generally thinks that only lawyers should do mediation, and they have tried through practice and legislation to make sure that it is difficult for non-lawyers to practice mediation. They have not been entirely successful, as our dinner companions’ experience shows, but it is difficult if you are not an attorney. Alicia told us of a speech on mediation that she gave to the Assembly here, during which she was actually jeered from the audience (made up mostly of lawyers). It is interesting that one way the legal community here has found to make money from mediation is through mediation training – they will take your money for the training, then , if you are not a lawyer, all you can do is hang the certificate on the wall – you can’t practice what they just took your money for teaching you.

This really highlights the perspective that IBO and Jeff Aresty brings to this issue in an online context – as you move away from “people, places, and paper” it is more and more possible for the idea of access to justice to expand, and to expand with non-lawyers playing a significant role.