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Students in UW School of Law’s Mediation Clinic were instrumental in providing services to clients in King County Small Claims Court. The students served as third party neutral mediators every Thursday during their time in the clinic. Their Mediation Clinic has an overall success rate of 83 percent.

Assumption of the role of a neutral was a new one for law students who spend their first-year in law school absorbed in the adversarial system. 

“When I think back on my time at UW, the mediation clinic and negotiations were by far the most immediately useful and relevant experience I had in school,” said Mat Lauritsen, JD ’08 and an associate at Kell, Alterman & Runstein, L.L.P. “It’s amazing how unprepared most people, even experienced lawyers, are when it comes to this skill set.”  

In addition to serving in small claims court, students take on cases from the Seattle branch of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). These cases involve larger sums of money at issue and often have lawyers representing the parties. 

For students to have the diverse experiences in both forums create a unique learning opportunity. 

“In small claims court students learn what it is like to mediate with disputants who are not represented,” said Christine Cimini, associate dean for experiential education and professor of law. “They walk into small claims court each week not knowing what type of dispute will come their way. They learn to think on their feet and be present in the room to help the disputants navigate their identified interests in the hopes of reaching an agreed upon resolution of their dispute.”

“This is contrasted with the EEOC mediation experiences where students have lots of time to prepare and obtain pre-mediation briefs by each disputant,” Cimini said. “With this information, they enter the mediation with a different perspective. Having both experiences provides invaluable learning opportunities for students.” 

The clinic, under the direction of Alan Kirtley, emeritus associate professor of law, submitted a memorandum to the Washington State Bar Association Committee on Professional Responsibility regarding advisory ethics opinion 2223. 

The memo encourages the committee to consider allowing lawyer mediators to draft pleadings, in support of the parties’ resolution of the dispute, assuming that the mediation parties resolved all of their issues during the mediation process.

Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference

The Annual Northwest Dispute Resolution Conference has been jointly organized and presented by the Washington State Bar Association's Alternative Dispute Resolution Section and the UW School of Law Mediation Clinic faculty since it was established in 1993.

Every year, the conference features nationally recognized speakers discussing a wide variety of dispute resolution topics in more than 50 sessions covering negotiation, mediation, arbitration, communication, and other skills applicable to dispute resolution and conflict engagement.

The 2018 conference included 320 participants, including many of the foremost dispute resolution experts in the Northwest. 

Save the date for the 25^th annual conference: March 28-29, 2019, at the UW School of Law.