Karl Bayer's Disputing Blog

Victoria Pynchon and the Power of Persuasion

By Victoria VanBuren - May 26, 2009

During this Memorial Day holiday, I came across a very interesting article by Victoria Pynchon, a graduate of the prestigious Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. The piece is a well-written personal anecdote about her volunteer work during the past U.S. presidential campaign. The lesson? you don’t have to be persuasive to persuade. Here is an excerpt: Funny, but I wasn’t really trying to convince her of anything. We were women ta

The Mediation Process: A Case Study

By Victoria VanBuren - May 15, 2009

If you’d like to know how disputes are successfully resolved by mediation, Peter A. Scarpato had an interesting guest-post at the Loree Reinsurance and Arbitration Law Forum yesterday about how mediation works. The piece provides an invaluable insight into the mediation process by walking the reader through an actual mediation case. Good stuff. Check out the post here: Guest Post – Mediating Reinsurance Disputes: A Case Study. Technor

Texas Bar Journal Article: The Future of Arbitration

By Victoria VanBuren - May 13, 2009

Mark A. Shank and John L. Turner from Gruber Hurst, Johansen & Hail, LLP wrote a timely article about arbitration, published this month by the Texas Bar Journal. The authors do an excellent job at explaining the virtues of arbitration (speed, informality, and low cost) and at the same time, address the latest challenges to mandatory arbitration by legislation introduced in Congress and the Texas Legislature. If you missed the article, here is

Report Recommends ADR Processes

By Victoria VanBuren - May 6, 2009

Via the ADR Prof Blog, we learned that the American College of Trial Lawyers Task Force on Discovery and the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System released a report on March 11, 2009. The report recommends, among other things, that courts raise the possibility of pre-trial mediation and other alternative resolution processes. The full report is here . Technorati Tags: arbitration, ADR, law,

Arbitration Fairness Act of 2009: Analysis

By Victoria VanBuren - April 29, 2009

“Arbitration Fairness Day” is today (see background here and here). O. Russel Murray wrote an interesting analysis on the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2009 (a.k.a. H.R. 1020; the status of the bill is here). He acknowledges that there have been some problems with mandatory arbitration within the context of employment, consumer, franchises, and civil right claims. However, Mr. Murray believes that the Arbitration Fairness Act might be w

Arbitration Empirical Studies

By Victoria VanBuren - March 24, 2009

So much has been said lately about the “evils” of arbitration, but so little attention has been given to studies regarding arbitration. In this article, from the Vol. 18, No. 1 of the Alternative Resolutions newsletter, John Allen Chalk, Sr. summarizes recent studies on the subject of arbitration, including studies on arbitration participants, attorney surveys, employment arbitration, and consumer arbitration. The article concludes th

White Paper on Arbitration

By Victoria VanBuren - February 23, 2009

We thought you’d want to check out this paper by John Allen Chalk and Rebecca Eaton from Whitaker, Chalk, Swindle & Sawyer, LLP. The authors do an excellent job at compiling noteworthy cases related to general arbitration, employment, consumer, and class actions arbitration.

Law Review Article Cites “Disputing”

By Victoria VanBuren - February 5, 2009

We recently hit an important milestone. Our blog, Disputing, has been cited in a law review article. The article is titled: Fifth Circuit Survey: Alternative Dispute Resolution, written by Donald R. Philbin Jr. and Audrey Lynn Maness, 40 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 445 (2008). As its title suggests, it provides a summary of noteworthy Fifth Circuit decisions and arbitration trend analysis. The blog posts cited by the article are: Fifth Circuit Rules on Cos