Over the past few weeks (though it feels more like years) I think we’ve all been flooded by one or both of two kinds of messages: feel-good stories about how we’re reconnecting with each other and nature and how we can maintain our positivity in a time of physical distancing; and/or a tidal wave of statistical, political and medical pieces about the pandemic, peoples’ behaviors and the upcoming elections.
This is neither of those.
*I know this photo isn't of potato chips but I couldn't find a photo of potato chips that was as cute as this cookie. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the folks that in moments of uncertainty can reflect meaningfully on the messages and bigger picture and I am truly in awe of those that can remain productive or become even more productive in times like this. But honestly, that’s not me.
I’m guessing like many of you, there are good days and bad days. I call them yoga and positivity days (the good days) and potato chips and leave me alone days (the bad days, although arguably potato chips days are also really good). I wake up and shower almost every day and some days I even wash my hair. I do yoga now more than ever thanks to not having a commute and I always wear lip gloss for my classes (I keep my video on so you know…).
I have my weekly zoom cocktail meetings that help keep me grounded with a small group of friends and I often have a second zoom cocktail gathering on the weekends. I’ve been part of zoom birthday parties and awards ceremonies, driveway celebrations and drive-by “gatherings”. Indeed, I’m weirdly more social now than I was pre-pandemic.
And I’ve had a chance, in the moments when I’m not teaching zoom classes or doing zoom ombudsing to think about moments that ended up being turning points. (Side thought: I wonder if zoom will become one of those words we use for everything like Kleenex and Q-Tip?). The biggest one and the one that I’m most often asked about is what made me shift from being a practicing attorney to being a conflict resolver. I’ve shared it at times when I’ve been asked but here, for anyone interested, is why I made that shift.
I graduated law school in 1993 (if you’re doing the math to figure out how old I am, know that I went to law school straight out of college, I have an August birthday and was the youngest in my class…just saying). When I came out of law school there were only two paths widely available for attorneys: going in-house to places like Dunkin (nee Dunkin Donuts) and doing contract work like leasing, franchises, etc… or litigation. I chose the latter and actually really enjoyed being in court - the mental sparring, the verbal sparring, the formality and having to think on my feet. Most of all I enjoyed being completely underestimated by my largely older, male opposing counsels who often mistook me for the paralegal or a placeholder for when “the real lawyer” arrived (don’t get me started).
I saw a lot of cases - contract, criminal, property etc… - and a few years into my practice I was hired by someone to do a probate case. He was a lovely guy whose sister had died intestate (without a will) leaving her children in the hands of their father, her husband, who was a really awful guy well known for filing lawsuits pro se* and making the courts and anyone he came in contact with miserable. My client, Ed, wanted to be sure that his nieces and nephews were taken care of financially and not left to fend for themselves which he knew would be the case if their father wasn’t prevented from spending the money in the estate on himself.
At that time, the “probate court” such as it was, in a remote part of Rhode Island was held once a month at the town hall and was presided over by a state trooper who never went to law school but had been made a once-a-month magistrate for that court by someone with the power to do that (don’t get me started). I argued on my client’s behalf that although a married spouse dying intestate was presumed to intend their estate go to their spouse, in this case, where the spouse couldn’t be trusted to care for the children, the court should grant me injunctive relieve (relief not at law but in equity, or fairness) and just put a hold on the wife’s estate so that it couldn’t be touched by anyone until the court decided what was in the best interest of the children. In essence I wasn’t asking the trooper to do anything but rather to prevent anyone from doing anything until a judge could decide what the kids needed and what their mother would have wanted for them.
The trooper said no. Whether it was because he didn’t understand injunctive relief and didn’t care to learn, whether he knew the father and/or had ties I wasn’t aware of (it's a really small state), or whether I was too young and/or too female for his liking (in which case maybe he would have preferred I ask a male colleague to argue instead of me…don’t get me started), I’ll never know, but he said no month after month that I came back to ask for the same relief.
Rhode Island didn’t then and it still doesn’t have an appellate court, which means that unlike in other states that do have appellate courts, if I don’t agree with the ruling made by a lower court (which I didn’t) I had to go to the highest court in the state – the Rhode Island Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) – to appeal. So, I filed with the SJC and while I was waiting for the appeal to be heard I went back every month to that remote town hall probate court to try to get the trooper to change his mind…which he never did.
It took almost two years to be heard by the SJC but they did agree with me: my client was entitled under the circumstances to injunctive relief that would keep his sister’s estate safe from her husband until the probate court could decide what was in the best interest of the children. The problem was that during the two years it took to get the right ruling from the court, nothing prevented the husband from spending everything in his dead wife’s estate while not caring for the kids. I think you can probably guess where this goes.
In the two years since I had first asked the probate court to do what the SJC ultimately said should have been done, the husband had spent everything in the estate and there was nothing left. The children were no longer a family unit and they were spread across the country, living with various family and friends as far away as Minnesota. And my client, Ed, who started the whole case by asking me to help him protect his nieces and nephews from their father who he knew wouldn’t protect them himself, had died of cancer.
I literally “won” nothing in winning that case. Ed’s widow was kind, she gave me a hug and thanked me for what I had tried to do for Ed and the kids. She told me that she was leaving the state and that she would sooner jump off a cliff than ever walk into a courtroom again. I was gutted.
I didn’t go to law school to engage in a process that not only didn’t work the way it was supposed to to help the good guys but that actually rewarded the intractable, the ill-intentioned, the uninformed, and the fight-at-all-costs most uncaring bad guys among us. I, like most lawyers (believe it or not), went to law school to help people. In this case, all my knowledge and training, all my skills and efforts didn’t help when they should have, for Ed and for those kids.
I decided to take a year off from practice to find my parachute** but as anyone that knows me will tell you, I don’t do well with down time so I found myself applying for jobs after just a couple of weeks. On a Friday I interviewed with the American Arbitration Association (AAA) in Boston and on the following Monday I started there as a case manager. Over my 3 years at the AAA I learned that cases that would likely take 2-5 years to make their way through the courts could be resolved in a matter of months, or less if they were trial ready. Even large, complex, multi-million-dollar cases could be decided in less time than it would take to get a case scheduled for trial in the courts and, more importantly, the parties involved in those cases could move on with their lives. It was a process that made sense.
In 1998, at the suggestion of a woman who happened to be sharing space with the AAA and who I call my Mediation Fairy G-dmother, I was trained as a mediator, and that's when the light bulb went off. I went to law school to help people - to give them a place and a voice to negotiate on their own behalf, and that's what mediation does. In the years that have followed I’ve made it my mission to help people ask for what they need to succeed, to stand up for themselves without knocking others down and to do conflict better.
In looking back, I've often wondered what I would be doing now if Ed hadn’t hired me or if the trooper had given me what I was asking for. I can’t honestly say that my work would be focused on conflict resolution had I not faced that stubborn trooper or the years-long delay in the courts. And I can’t say with any degree of certainty that I’d be where I am right now had I not felt as confused and pained by the empty win. That awful moment in my career forced me to reconsider and pivot in a way that comfort never would have…and in retrospect I’m grateful for it.
I suppose I could end this by recognizing some bigger picture message to attach to the now: that in dark times we’re given the opportunity to reexamine and when we’re in discomfort we can rethink and realign what matters to us. Or maybe that in retrospect we see messages that are too overwhelming and painful to recognize as meaningful and positive in the moment. Or maybe something else.
But I said that this wasn’t going to be one of those types of pieces and I intend to keep to that. So I’ll just say that I hope you enjoyed - or were at least momentarily distracted - by reading this, and that if it’s your thing to extract meaning, I hope you’ve found some here (and I really would love for you to share it with me if you’re so inclined).
And finally, wherever you are reading this, I hope that you have plenty of positivity and plenty of potato chips. Be well, stay safe and I hope our paths cross again in the real world soon. *Pro Se means on one’s own behalf aka without an attorney.
** What Color is Your Parachute is a self-help book for job seekers by Richard Nelson Bolles that was originally written in 1970 and has been revised annually.
Recent Stuff
(That Might Seem Like a Long Time Ago)
February marked my 5th year at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health teaching negotiation with a gender and culture lens and also my first time getting to talk with Harvard Chan Women in Leadership. I'm always grateful for those public health, science and medical minds but never more so than now!
Since March I've been teaching my Emerson College classes via zoom and it's been interesting teaching negotiation tactics, like scarcity, to students in a way that suddenly makes much more sense in the context of their lives. (I've also been ombudsing for Wesleyan University via zoom but as you can imagine, there are no pictures or props for that.)
Visit my website Teaching, Training and Ombudsing
In early April I was interviewed by the Purple Principle Podcast about how mediation might help our current political divide and I was also interviewed by a former student (and current professional rock star), Abby Thompson, for her piece on Medium, The Power of Asking & Getting to "No" -give it a read!
Comentarios