Mediation Briefs
Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2015 10:23 pm
I tell the parties "letter brief of no more than seven pages (less is fine)". And that encourages them subtly not to send 100 pages of attachments. That usually works for me as mediator.
And makes a lot more sense for the parties.
Jason
Sent from my iPhone
> On Mar 7, 2015, at 12:30 PM, jhayes@hayesbklaw.com [cdcbaa] wrote:
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> Folks,
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> I walked in my office recently and found an inch - inch and a half thick pleading sitting on my chair. It is a mediation BRIEF from a party provided to me one afternoon before the scheduled mediation. The brief itself is 14 pages of dense legal argument - page upon page of minutia - with a good 100 pages of attachments. It reads like someone's closing argument to the jury or motion for summary judgment.
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> Unfortunately this happens all the time. I scan through it and think "So the debtor cheated someone." The Debtor's brief inevitably goes on and on about how he is a saint, with more minutia about why it is absolutely obvious that he will win at trial - (when trial will be is rarely stated).
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> These are not useful to the mediator at all and a huge waste of time. Especially since the briefs are almost always marked in large words - CONFIDENTIAL, i.e., the litigant doesn't want the other side to know all this minutia.
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> The local rules - Appendix III - set out very nicely what should be in the briefs and the deadlines. I think in the 100-150 mediations I have done, I got briefs that followed the guidelines maybe once.
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> 90% of the time I have been the mediator, the creditor is saying - at the mediation (and presumably somewhere in the brief) - "I was cheated by this scumbag." The debtor is saying "I didn't cheat anyone and I don't have any money anyway." A good mediation brief will put that into 3-4 pages (the Local Rules say no more than 10 pages). So I get a sense of what I am dealing with. I'm not going to rule on anything. I'm not going to spend hours and hours learning the minutia.
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> I'm sure Dennis and Jason Wallach and others who do mediations can chime in on this.
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