Lawyers who represent their clients in mediation may often find themselves at odds with their mediators. The mediators may be trying to create new value for the parties, beyond a simple compromise of their legalistic claims and defenses. They may be seeking to repair or improve the parties’ relationship, or they may wish to lead the parties to greater mutual understanding. Lawyers, on the other...

Commonly cited causes of the crisis include the high number of lawyers in the United States, increasing litigiousness of society, juries which side with victims rather than uncaring big business, and the growing technological complexity of society (Huber 1987). Notably absent from such accounts are explanations relating to the management practices of insurers themselves. Why are there so many t...

Is there a connection between state-law tort reform and the explosive growth of U.S. intellectual property (IP) litigation? The literature has established that the number of tort claims in states with tort reform has gone down. How do personal injury (PI) plaintiff lawyers deal with the decrease in the demand for their services? Could a significant number of them end up shifting their practice ...

The use of the trial as the dominant form of dispute resolution is diminishing,2 yet law schools continue to train young lawyers as if the courtroom will be the principal venue for addressing legal conflicts. The historically narrow focus of legal curricula on litigation and appeals is insufficient to prepare young lawyers for the world that awaits them.3 While clients will continue to need att...

This paper examines how the advice that lawyers provide to their clients affects the disclosure of evidence and the outcome of adjudication, and how the adjudicator should allocate the burden of proof in light of these effects. Despite lawyers’ expertise in assessing the evidence, their advice is found to have no effect on adjudication, if the lawyers follow disclosure strategies that are undom...

In legal reasoning the Bayesian network approach has gained increasingly more attention over the last years due to the increase in scientific forensic evidence. It can however be questioned how meaningful a Bayesian network is in terms that are easily comprehensible by judges and lawyers. Argumentation models, which represent arguments and defeat, are arguably closer to their natural way of arg...