Law Commons^™

Real Practice Systems Annotated Bibliography, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Real Practice Systems (RPS) theory holds that practitioners’ practice systems are based on their personal histories, values, goals, motivations, knowledge, and skills as well as the parties and the cases in their work. RPS analysis can be used in many dispute resolution roles such as mediator, advocate in mediation, negotiator, and litigator generally. In mediation, practitioners develop categories of cases, parties, and behavior patterns that lead them to design routine procedures and strategies for dealing with recurring challenges before, during, and after mediation sessions.

RPS theory is the culmination of much of the work in my scholarly career. The bibliography …

Law Students Can Use Portfolios To Plan Their Practice Systems, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes how law schools can help students plan for successful careers by using Real Practice System self-assessments to guide them in developing individualized portfolios. Portfolios identify students’ learning objectives and experiences designed to achieve them. Portfolios may include a variety of elements such as writing samples, video recordings, grades, faculty evaluations, clinical course journals, and extracurricular experiences.

Helping Law Students Define And Pursue Success, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post collects prior posts about how to help law students define and pursue professional success.

Real Lawyering Practice Systems, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

Most of the pieces in the RPS Project have focused on mediation. The theory is not limited to mediation, and this post applies it to lawyering.

Technology In Real Practice Systems, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post uses the RPS mediation checklists to illustrate practitioners’ great reliance on technology.

Randy Kiser’S New Book On Professional Judgment For Lawyers, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes Randall Kiser’s book, Professional Judgment for Lawyers. He defines professional judgment as “the deliberate synthesis of an attorney’s knowledge, experience, skills, discernment, and character to ethically advance a client’s interest.” The book combines empirical research, cognitive and social psychology, organizational behavior, legal ethics, and neuroscience to improve decision-making by attorneys, clients, judges, arbitrators, mediators, and juries.

Easy As Pi, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post presents some interactions with Pi, an AI system that is more conversational than others. It illustrates that, in the foreseeable future, AI systems almost certainly will become a lot more sophisticated and be incorporated into much of our lives, often in ways we will not notice

Training Your Mediator Bot, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek post discusses biases in AI systems. Noting that AI bots need to be “trained,” this post suggests that untrained mediator bots may spew out unwanted interventions such as providing undesired evaluations of BATNA values – or failing to provide desired evaluations. So mediators probably will need to co-mediate with their bots for a while to observe and correct its biases. Ironically, bots may produce language that normal humans understand much better than the confusing jargon we habitually use. So the mediator bots may need to train human mediators.

Teaching Students To Focus On Party Decision-Making, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes why law schools don’t teach students very much about helping clients make decisions and suggests techniques for doing so. It suggests (1) focusing on parties’ roles throughout relevant courses, (2) including meaningful party roles in simulations and competitions, (3) using simulations focusing solely on preparation, (4) using multi-stage simulations, (5) helping students focus on parties’ intangible interests in simulations and Stone Soup interviews, (6) using the terms “pre-mediation-session” or “before mediation sessions,” (7) taking advantage of the litigation interest and risk assessment framework and materials, and (8) recommending that schools offer a course on strategic case evaluation …

Focus On Party Decision-Making, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

A major motivation in the modern dispute resolution movement has been to increase and improve parties’ decision-making in their legal disputes. Parties can participate more effectively in negotiation and mediation if they engage in decision-making early in disputes. This suggests the importance of good preparation before negotiation and mediation sessions. When parties are well-prepared in advance, they are as knowledgeable, confident, and assertive as possible in making decisions in their cases

Charlie Irvine's Challenge To Mediators To Describe Your Mediation System, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

Charlie Irvine is the Course Leader on the University of Strathclyde’s (Scotland) MSc/LLM in Mediation and Conflict Resolution and the Director of the Strathclyde Mediation Clinic. The Clinic provides a free mediation service in which experienced practitioners work alongside trainee mediators to help people resolve disputes without going to court or tribunal. The following is Charlie’s Director’s Column published in Mediation Matters!, the Clinic’s quarterly newsletter. Irvine wrote an account of his own mediation system that was one of ten real mediation systems Lande analyzed in Real Mediation Systems to Help Parties and Mediators Achieve Their Goals.

Party Self-Empowerment From Preparation For Mediation Sessions, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

If parties are well-prepared before mediation sessions, they will be knowledgeable, confident, and assertive so that they can exercise their decision-making authority as well as possible. Well-prepared parties can make decisions before and during mediation sessions rather than simply relying on mediators to promote their self-determination. In other words, they will feel more empowered to participate productively. Depending on the circumstances, mediators, lawyers, courts, and/or mediation programs may help parties get prepared.

Len Riskin Pulls It All Together In Managing Conflict Mindfully, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes Len Riskin’s impressive career and summarizes themes in his book, Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think. He argues that people can wisely manage conflict by learning to use and integrate three sets of ideas and techniques – negotiation, mindfulness, and internal family systems (IFS). You can think of IFS as the conversation or negotiation between different voices in our heads. Rather than conceiving people as having only a single “unitary” self, IFS recognizes the “multiplicity” of our selves.

Problem-Resolution Lawyering Across The Twenty-First Century Law Curriculum, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post highlights an article by Kris Franklin and F. Peter Phillips. They argue, “Framing lawyers’ professional role as helping clients resolve problems – and therefore in turn, conceiving law school coursework as preparation for that role – should alter teaching, learning, and law practice in ways that inevitably improves each.” The article includes “exemplars” of ways to shift the legal curriculum to focus on lawyers as problem resolution partners.

A Proposal For The Joint Development Of Generative Ai For The Dispute Resolution Profession, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post by Gary Doernhoefer proposes the development of a data set for the dispute resolution profession as the basis for AI systems. The ideal model would be for a collaboration in the dispute resolution field to create the refined data set, establish guardrails, and set privacy parameters for the use of the data. This would involve a centralized advisory board to address concerns such as (1) privacy requirements for how the queries are received, stored, and used, (2) the expertise needed to curate additional training materials, (3) shared costs of development, and (4) gaining the cooperation of industry authors …

Real Mediation Systems To Help Parties And Mediators Achieve Their Goals, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article argues that it is time for a paradigm shift in our current general mediation theory because of numerous problems. Our current theory is incomplete at best and seriously misleading at worst. The traditional mediation models are oversimplified, poorly mapping onto the reality of practice. They combine multiple elements that are not necessarily correlated. Many practitioners ignore them because they are confusing or not helpful. People do not understand the theoretical meanings because the terms are not consistent with commonly understood language. Arguments about what is or is not real or good mediation have spawned unhelpful ideological divisions in …

Ai, Adr, And Anxiety, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post discusses AI generally, growing anxiety about it and modern life generally, and how we can manage this anxiety. Anxiety about AI may be feeding into a more general anxiety about events in the US and around the world. We can address anxiety by focusing on what we actually can control. Regarding AI and ADR, I suggest that the machine mediation “glass” will be partly empty and partly full – as is human mediation. It’s important to recognize our own reactions to and fears about AI, have as accurate and balanced an understanding of what’s happening as possible, acknowledge …

Avatar Mediation, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post speculates about how AI systems might mediate (or assist in mediation) in the not-too-distant future.

Should We Get Rid Of The Bar Exam?, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post discusses an article analyzing empirical data about licensing of lawyers in Wisconsin. Graduates of Wisconsin schools have a diploma privilege and are licensed in that state without taking a bar exam. The article argues that bar exams generally don’t fulfill their purpose of protecting the public. They consume tremendous resources of the legal profession, law schools, and law student and divert attention from activities that are likely to be more effective and valuable.

Ai And Empathy, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post speculates about whether AI systems will be able to replicate human empathy – at least enough to satisfy people interacting with them.

A Mediator And A Bot Walk Into A Bar …, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post presents ChatGPT’s decent response to a question about the main models of mediation (or at least much better than what most of my students would have written).

How The Real Practice Systems Project Can Help Improve Mediation Quality, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

Improving mediation quality is tricky. This post describes how the Real Practice Systems Project can help.

Using Real Practice Systems Resources In Practice, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes how mediators can use ideas and materials from the Real Practice Systems Project to better understand and improve their own mediation systems. Mediators’ practice systems are the combination of factors affecting what they do before, during, and after mediation sessions. These systems include their routine procedures and strategies for dealing with recurring challenging situations. Trainers and mediation program administrators can use this to help mediators in their programs.

Resources For Using Real Practice Systems Materials In Teaching, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes how faculty can use ideas and materials from the Real Practice Systems Project to help students get realistic understandings of practice. Although the project has generally focused on the systems that mediators develop and use, it can be adapted to understand the perspectives of lawyers acting as advocates in mediation, negotiators, and in legal practice generally. In addition to requiring or recommending that students read publications about real practice systems, faculty could assign students to write papers such as (1) a Stone Soup interview of a practitioner, (2) a description of students’ actual system in simulated or …

Shifting The Central Paradigm To Dispute System Design, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post argues that instead of identifying our field as ADR, we should use dispute system design as our central theoretical framework. Although people often think of DSD as being used only in large organizations, individuals and small practice groups also handle streams of cases and can use these principles and techniques to improve their case management and dispute resolution procedures. DSD is about tailoring dispute systems to the needs of stakeholders, especially disputing parties. Good designs fit the stakeholders’ context and culture so that the dispute processes produce as much satisfaction of the parties’ procedural and substantive goals as …

Houston, We Have A Problem In The Dispute Resolution Field, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

Parties are supposed to actively participate in mediation (and other dispute resolution processes to some extent), and thus they need to understand what experts are saying. Lawyers representing clients in mediation especially need to understand the process to fulfill their ethical responsibility of competence. And certainly mediators should understand basic concepts of mediation.

Shestowsky’S Study Supports Value Of Lawyers’ Early Education Of Clients About Their Procedural Options, John M. Lande, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post summarizes parts of Donna Shestowsky’s study on parties’ expectations about the process used to resolve their cases. She writes, “Our findings suggest the value of educating litigants about legal procedures, helping them develop realistic expectations for what each procedure can entail for their situation, and helping them make informed decisions about whether to attend their procedures. . . . Our results suggest how important it is for lawyers to educate their clients about each of their procedural options. Effective education and managing client expectations might lead to the formation of attitudes that reflect realistic expectations, and, in turn, …

Readings And Resources For Teaching, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post provides links to resources that instructors can use when teaching dispute resolution.

Study Of Odr In Family Cases With Positive Results, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post summarizes the results of a study finding that parties who used ODR for child custody, parenting time, or child support matters were more likely to reach agreement and to rate their experience more highly than those who declined to use ODR.

The Legal Profession, Judiciary, And Dispute Resolution, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

The January 2022 issue of Dispute Resolution Magazine reports results of a survey of past contributors conducted by Editorial Board co-chairs Andrea Schneider and Michael Moffitt.

This post uses some of the survey responses to suggest that we recognize the legal profession and judiciary as part of the dispute resolution field.