When you walk into a lawyer’s office, the welcoming smile of the office administrator and the legal counsel whom you seek to consult disarms you and puts you at ease. There are those who require you to pay a significant sum of money to “open a file,” and there are the few who will give you a moment to tell your tale. You tell your story, and the race begins.
Except in the legal aid scheme with which I worked during my first two years of legal practice, it was, and still is, rare to find a lawyer who suggests negotiation or mediation with your adversary. “You have a good case,” is the common response to your narration. You are then quickly presented with a brief estimate of what your case in court will cost you. An offer is made to accept a down-payment with a suggestion that the outstanding balance would be due and payable in instalments spread over a reasonable period of time. The paperwork is done, and a case is filed. From then on, the fate of your claim hangs on the balance with more questions than answers until the fateful day of judgment.
What No-One Tells You
There are five things no litigation lawyer tells you:
(a) whether your case will take two, three, four, five or ten years in court;
(b) how much your case will cost in time, money and emotionally;
(c) that the judgment and decree of the court for which you strive will not resolve, but escalate, the dispute at hand;
(d) that the family or business relationship from which the dispute arose will be destroyed once and for all the moment the case is determined; and
(e) that there are quick, inexpensive, effective and satisfying means of resolving your dispute amicably.
You might ask why no-one tells you. It is perhaps the traditions in which legal practitioners are schooled. Maybe it makes no business sense to tell you that courts apply the law to determine claims and pass judgment either way without a care in the world as to the consequences the ultimate decision has on your relationship. It is also likely that your lawyer is completely unaware of alternatives to court litigation, alternatives that do not yield the colossal sums of money charged in legal fees year after year right from taking instructions, drafting court documents, correspondence, copying charges, telephone calls, process service, court attendance (at hourly, half-day or daily rates), meetings, hearing, etc. etc. You get to know what the real cost is when you receive your itemized Bill of Costs at the end of the fight in which you win or lose. If yours was a marital or family dispute, the relationship is completely destroyed. The court judgment drives the last nail on its coffin. So is a business relationship. Yet neither the court or your lawyer is to blame. It is a trade to which you either submit or think twice.
When I stopped to Think and Think Again
After three years of litigation in family disputes, I stopped. It occurred to me that courts do not, and cannot, administer marriages and manage family relationships. In short, courts do not run families. They only sit to hear and decide who the winner in the court battle is. It then became my practice to encourage negotiated resolution of family disputes years before someone told me of something called “mediation”.
A decade later, I drew a client banker’s attention to the destructive practice of obtaining judgments and decrees, and destroying the lives of defaulting borrowers at the bank’s disproportionate costs. Paper judgments became the order of the day with nothing to show for the court victories we scored case after case. It is then that we agreed to radically change our approach, negotiate, reschedule debts, write-off mounting interest, and agree on soft terms of repayment. It worked. Little did I know that I would, sooner than later, quit litigation altogether after training in alternative dispute resolution (ADR).
Looking Back with Deep Satisfaction
It is deeply satisfying to mediate in disputes between marriage mates, family members, bankers and clients, insurers and claimants, and see them walk out of the mediation room with big smiles on their face, having reached settlement in their own terms. Their tears of joy spur me on to tell people what my colleagues either do not know or do not wish to disclose to the disputants.
Premier ADR Consultants work hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs and marriage mates with strained business or marital relations on the verge of breakup or separation to resolve their disputes by means of our transformative conflict management and dispute resolution strategies. We help parties salvage, restore and maintain healthy business and family relationships in a safe and peaceful environment with guaranteed privacy and confidentiality.
Our expeditious, cost-effective and party-controlled techniques guarantee consumer satisfaction resulting from the voluntary and jointly generated win-win outcomes. We provide the best alternative to the all-familiar costly, time-consuming, adversarial and often emotive court litigation that only works to weaken and ultimately destroy business, marital and family relations.
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