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JADE Mediation Practice Group

When Bad People Happen to Good Mediators

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Via ZOOM

Guest Coach: Robert Besunder, B.A., LL.B., Q.Med.

Our guest coach, Robert Besunder, will share his expertise on how to manage the challenges that can occur when good faith and cooperation are not present at the mediation table.

Mediation is supposed to be a process that involves good faith, honesty, cooperation…FULL STOP! No it isn’t. Mediation is a facilitated negotiation, often between parties that have no love for each other whatsoever. If there was all this good faith to begin with, a mediation probably wouldn’t even be necessary. While you as the mediator try to help parties find common interests, and an eventual resolution of a dispute, sometimes that isn’t the plan on the part of one, or all, of the parties. And sometimes the problem isn’t the party, but their legal representative. With all your training and experience as a mediator, are you really prepared for the lawyer from hell? Some mediations just don’t run the way you’d like them to run, because of one or more difficult counsel. How do you handle them? How do you control the process as the mediator when someone doesn’t want to have the process controlled? 

Our guest coach, Robert Besunder, wears several hats – which he thinks is a good thing, because of vanity arising from a lack of haircuts in a lockdown. He has been a lawyer for 30 years, practicing primarily insurance and personal injury litigation for most of that time, and for the past five years has been a sole practitioner at Besunder Law. He has been mediating for the past six years as Besunder Dispute Resolution, and he received his Q.Med. designation in 2017. For the past 16 years, he has also been sitting as a Deputy Judge in the Small Claims Court in Central East region. And, in 2020, he founded Besunder Learning, which offers educational webinars and (when the pandemic is over, workshops) for legal and dispute resolution professionals. He does not consider himself to be one of the lawyers from hell.

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