Mediation often involves an all-day, in-person session with a retired judge (who may or may not have familiarity with the subject matter of your dispute), and where parties spend much of their time sitting around or, worse, educating the mediator about how law firms work today. That’s not the best approach for law firm partnership disputes for several reasons.
• First, partnership disputes involve issues that often don’t develop all at once, and they typically don’t get resolved all at once. In our experience, one long exhausting day in a generic conference room is not the right way, and not a sufficient process, to identify, address, and resolve all of the many issues—both financial and emotional—involved in partnership disputes. A better approach is to sequence these sessions, focusing on processing both the practical and financial issues and the emotional ones.
• Second, more practically, resolving partnership disputes is most effective when it’s customized based on the dispute. The right resolution may require information not available in one mediation moment in time. For example, perhaps the right resolution involves agreeing that a former partner will participate in current revenue in some way. To resolve a law firm dispute in that way, for example, you need to have reliable, confirmed, specific firm financial information. A one-time mediation doesn’t fit that scenario. A customized approach, perhaps involving sequenced mediation sessions, can facilitate a more creative resolution of the issues.
• Third, resolving law firm partnership disputes requires substantive knowledge and experience related to partnership law, contract law, corporate law, and legal ethics. But that’s not really enough: you also have to know how law firms work, including how they distribute the money among partners, promote partners, and what makes them grow or shrink.
Spending all day in a conference room is one way to do it. In our experience, it’s not the best way to resolve law firm partnership disputes. Is your mediator customizing their approach for your dispute? Is your mediator sequencing mediation to identify issues and handle them in a logical order? Does your mediator understand not just the law that will govern the dispute but also how law firms work?
If not, it’s time for an alternative approach to mediating law firm partnership disputes.
