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Consequences Of Power, Tamara Relis

Scholarly Works

This Article challenges a basic premise that litigants and their attorneys broadly understand and desire similar things from litigation-track mediation processes. In providing new empirical research from medical malpractice cases, I offer disconcerting evidence of the surprising degree to which perceptions and meanings ascribed to these litigation-track processes are not only diverse, but frequently contradictory. I demonstrate that notwithstanding their different allegiances, lawyers on all sides of cases have correspondingly similar understandings of the meaning and purpose of litigation-track mediations. At the same time, I show how plaintiffs and defendants have the same understandings and visions of what mediation is …