Fall 2023 Professional Skills Series

May 13-14, 2021 - Advanced Mediation: Perfecting Our Craft   THIS CLASS IS SOLD OUT. Email lori.rushford@pepperdine.edu to be on a waiting list.
Faculty:  Bruce Edwards
(Includes one/half hour of Legal Ethics)

Class Times: Two morning sessions, Thursday/Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with two 15 minute breaks. Total class time is 7 hours.

An interactive, skill enhancement course facilitated by an experienced trainer with over 35 years of mediation and training experience in the U.S. and abroad.

This course invites you to engage in reflective learning with other experienced mediators as we "drill down" on important topics effecting our profession. You will read blogs on cutting edge topics and be exposed to unique forms of online learning.

Join us in taking your skills, and your career to the next level as you learn:

• Techniques that are customized to the different stages of mediation (early, mid-stage, and late-stage negotiations)

• Diagnosis of sources of resistance and specific strategies for different sources of impasse

• Skills for working with high emotion

• Knowledge of communication issues across cultures and understanding the concept of implicit bias

• Approaches to expanding your practice beyond "cases" - brainstorming how to use our skills beyond the traditional litigated case and expanding our market

• Pre-mediation and post-mediation strategies that are appreciated in the market and will make your practice stand out from the other providers

• Ethical issues that mediators face due to the changing nature of the field

Faculty: Bruce Edwards

Bruce Edwards was an industry pioneer in the field of alternative dispute resolution. Since 1986 he has mediated over 6,000 disputes throughout the United States involving complex, multiparty lawsuits and specializing in matters of high emotion. Edwards has consistently received recognition for his work as a mediator including awards for "San Francisco Mediation Lawyer of the Year", "Best Lawyer, Alternative Dispute Resolution Category", and "California Top Neutral" to name a few. Since 1993 Edwards has served as an adjunct professor at the Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University School of Law where he teaches courses in advanced mediation. In addition to his teaching in the United States, he has personally taught mediation skills to hundreds of attorneys, judges, business leaders and aspiring mediators throughout Europe, Africa, India and Asia. As a founding Partner of JAMS, the largest provider of ADR services in the United States, Edwards has worked at the epicenter of the emerging ADR industry over the past two decades, recently serving as the Chairman of the JAMS Board of Directors.

Most recently, he has cofounded the Edwards Mediation Academy, an online education platform for teaching practical mediation skills to a global audience.

July 8-9, 2021 - Family Law Mediation: Getting to Innovative Outcomes
Faculty:  Hon. Irwin Joseph (retired) and Donald T. Saposnek, Ph.D.

Class Times: Two morning sessions, Thursday/Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with two 15 minute breaks. Total class time is 7 hours

This seven-hour, highly interactive, inter-disciplinary training (taught by a judge and a psychologist) is designed for attorneys, judges, therapists, custody evaluators, and others who wish to learn and improve their skills in mediating family law conflicts. It is a condensed version of our highly successful seventeen-hour PSP program at Straus. Special emphasis will be placed on resolving disputes when there is limited time and limited resources available. After exploring an overview of core approaches and principles of mediation, participants, through discussion and role plays, will learn and practice a range of specific mediation strategies. Much practical information will be interspersed within discussion and role-plays that will incorporate essential and innovative perspectives on the psychology and dynamics of divorce, critical child development research, the ways in which high levels of conflict and emotions in family law cases manifest and present special problems for the mediator, and a host of unique opportunities for creative dispute resolution in family law cases.

What we will cover:

• An overview of core mediation principles and approaches.
• Managing implicit power imbalances.
• The psychology and dynamics of high-conflict divorce.
• Bargaining and negotiating
• The anatomy of custody disputes.
• Mediating personal property, custody, and visitation/access issues.
• Gatekeeping and alienation.
• The complex issues in cases involving domestic violence.
• Special issues when mediating on-line during COVID.

Faculty: Irwin Joseph and Don Saposnek

Honorable Irwin Joseph (retired) provides private mediation, arbitration, and private judging services in Northern California. Before retirement, he served as a Superior Court All Purpose Judge (as a Commissioner) in Santa Clara County and in Santa Cruz County for almost 15 years. His bench experience included family, civil, and criminal assignments. During his eight years in the family law division, he heard dissolution, custody, support, paternity, and domestic violence matters. He created the Judicially Supervised Settlement Conference (Mediation) program and the Early Neutral Evaluation Program for Family Court. He co-taught mediation skills to judges in Singapore and at over twenty Straus trainings. He has mediated thousands of conflicts since 1995. He was a faculty member of the Center for Judicial Education and Research (CJER) and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), and a member of the Elkins Family Law Task Force. He is a graduate of the University of La Verne College of Law and UCLA.

Donald T. Saposnek, Ph.D., is a practicing clinical-child psychologist and child custody mediator, a family therapist for over 50 years, and a national and international trainer of mediation and child development, and in several recent years presenting trainings to judges and lawyers in Singapore. He is author of the classic book, Mediating Child Custody Disputes: A Strategic Approach, and coauthor of Splitting America: How Politicians, Super PACS and the News Media Mirror High-Conflict Divorce, and of The Child Support Solution: Unhooking Custody from Support. He has mediated over 5,000 custody disputes since 1977, was Director of the Santa Cruz County Family Court Services for 17 years, and has published extensively in the professional literature on mediation, child custody, and child psychology. He has taught on the psychology faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz for 41 years, is Editor-in-Chief of publications for the Academy of Professional Family Mediators, and serves on the editorial boards of numerous publishing houses and several international journals on conflict resolution. He co-created this course twelve years ago to bring psychological and child-developmental research perspectives to the work of divorce professionals.

July 15–16, 2021 - Psychology of Conflict
Faculty:  Stephanie Blondell
Class Times: Two morning sessions, Thursday/Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with two 15 minute breaks. Total class time is 7 hours.

How do the current COVID technological and sociological adaptations impact the behaviors of litigants and their advocates? What is the impact on conflict in our homes, workplaces, and schools? This course examines the four pillars of the psychology of conflict: attention, empathy, leverage, and decision-making, through a post-COVID lens. Continue to create your own version of mediation "magic" by updating your understanding of human behavior with insights from the areas of cognitive and social psychology, neuroscience, and communication theory.

Faculty: Stephanie Blondell

Stephanie Blondell is an associate professor of law and assistant director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. She supervises the Mediation Clinic and teaches Mediation Theory and Practice, Psychology of Conflict, and Criminal Law. Prior to joining Pepperdine, she served as the manager of the King County Alternative Dispute Resolution Program and Interlocal Conflict Resolution Group, a tri-county labor-management and public policy mediation program in the area around Seattle, Washington. Prior to this she was the alternative dispute resolution coordinator for the City of Seattle where she designed and implemented a labor and employment mediation program for city government. Before joining Straus full-time, Blondell served as an adjunct professor at Straus, the Seattle University School of Law, and the University of Washington master of public administration program. Blondell earned her BA with honors in American civilization from Brown University, and her JD from the University of Washington School of Law.

July 29-30, 2021 - Promoting Civility, Dialogue, and Finding Common Ground
Faculty:  Tracy Allen and Eric Galton 

Class Times: Two morning sessions, Thursday/Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with two 15 minute breaks. Total class time is 7 hours.

Course description for Promoting Civility, Dialogue, and Finding Common Ground 

Our National dialogue is out of control. Daily we are subject to polarized, fractured narratives, amplified by the echo chambers of news programs and social media. The consequences, among many, are that we have lost the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable. We have minimized the opportunities for collaborative solutions. It appears we are losing our empathic abilities. And worst of all, we feel powerless to adjust the narratives.

Help is on the way in this course. Topics for discussion and further learning include:

• How did we got to the state of the state we are experiencing? What are you sensing and feeling in your own individual worlds?
• How are human beings and minds pre-wired for predictable reactions and responses to disagreements? Does understanding this science help us explain and cope with our own limitations and senses, as well as those of others?.
• What to do about it all. What skills can we deploy? What processes can we apply, to help engage in learning conversations as perspective takers with intellectual humility and understanding? Learn about the 7 steps to achieve a civil conversation that involves disagreeing without being disagreeable.

This interactive course will bring forth dialogue among us that we hope will be sensitive, perhaps controversial, and enlightening. We expect you to leave with some new and/ or sharpened skills in your learning and communication toolbox to take back to your families, workplaces, churches, communities and neighborhoods.

Faculty: Tracy Allen and Eric Galton

Tracy L. Allen is a full-time mediator, arbitrator and ADR trainer. She teaches and practices internationally, providing conflict management, prevention, and training services worldwide. A former tax and business attorney, Allen mediates and arbitrates complex and highly emotional commercial, business, probate, securities, and employment cases. She is a Distinguished Fellow and a past president of the International Academy of Mediators. She has written numerous articles and is a contributing author in several books on ADR, with emphasis on mediation and negotiation strategies. She received the State Bar of Michigan ADR Section Distinguished Service Award in 2008 and currently serves on several specialty ADR provider panels nationally and internationally.   Allen is a Distinguished Professor in the College of Leadership and Public Service for Lipscomb University and a frequent lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Legal Education at the University of Michigan.  Allen is the owner of her Detroit-based resolution firm, Global Resolutions, PLLC.

Eric Galton is the co-owner of Lakeside Mediation Center in Austin, Texas. Galton was
licensed to practice law in Texas in 1976 and has been a full-time mediator for nearly 30 years. He has mediated over 7,500 disputes throughout Texas and the United States. Galton is a Past President of the International Academy of Mediators, a member of the National Association of
Distinguished Neutrals, and a Texas Distinguished Credentialed Mediator. He has been listed as a Texas SuperLawyer and has been in the Who's Who of International Commercial Mediators for ten straight years. Galton served as an adjunct professor at University of Texas School of Law for eight years and has and continues to serve as an adjunct faculty member at Pepperdine School of Law. He has published five books about mediation and for the last three years has taught a course around the United States entitled Restoring Civil Discourse in an Overheated Society.

August 5-6, 2021
Faculty: Sukhsimran Singh and Deep Basraon

Class Time: Two morning sessions, Thursday/Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with two 15 minute breaks. Total class time is 7 hours.

Course Description for Cross-Cultural Dispute Resolution Coming Soon

Sukhsimranjit Singh practices, teaches, and trains in dispute resolution. He is the Judge Danny Weinstein Managing Director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution and assistant professor of law and practice at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law where he also directs the LLM program in dispute resolution. He specializes in cross-cultural dispute resolution and has published numerous articles in that field, and in 2015 he delivered a TED Talk on cross-cultural communications in Salem, Oregon. He has mediated intercultural and commercial cases in the United States, India, and Canada, among other countries. An Honorary Fellow with the International Academy of Mediators, he is also a council member of the Section of Dispute Resolution of the American Bar Association and board member at Weinstein International Foundation. He has trained lawyers and law students in more than 30 states and 22 countries. Singh obtained his Ph.D. from National Law University, Delhi, master of laws in dispute resolution from University of Missouri-Columbia and was a Fellow at the Dispute Resolution Institute at Hamline University School of Law. An avid reader and an amateur photographer, he loves to travel with his family. He is passionate for music, sports, and interacting with new cultures.

Baldeep "Deep" Basraon is a lead consultant for businesses in the United States and Canada on cross-cultural decision making and on statistical analysis of business growth. She merges the two fields of dispute resolution and mathematics with her master's degree in dispute resolution from the University of Oregon School of Law and her bachelor of science in statistics and applied mathematics from California State University. Among other clients, Basraon has successfully helped Choice Hotels, Wyndham Group, Food Chains, Farm Owners, and Private Dispute Resolution Practices in managing revenue increases while creating budget cuts. With a passion to help parties in identity-based conflicts, her mediation practice is focused on business-to-business conflicts and national culture conflicts. Deep has taught or lectured on negotiation and cross-cultural dispute resolution at national and international conferences in India, the United States, and Canada, and has served as a professor of mathematics at Chemeketa Community College in Oregon.

August 12-13, 2021 - Advanced Negotiation
Faculty: Lord Sebastian Coe and Sukhsimran Singh

Class Times: Two morning sessions, Thursday/Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with two 15 minute breaks. Total class time is 7 hours.

Course Description for Advanced Negotiation Coming Soon

Faculty: Lord Sebastian Coe and Sukhsimran Singh

Lord Coe CH, KBE - Sebastian Coe has been President of World Athletics (formally International Association of Athletics Federations) since 2015 after serving as a Vice President since 2007 and was elected to become a member of the International Olympic Committee in July 2020.  He serves as Non-Executive Chairman of CSM Sport and Entertainment within the Chime Communications group, a Non-Executive Director of the Vitality companies, a Non-Executive Director of Fortescue Metals Group, and a Non-Executive Director of the British Olympic Association.  Coe is the former Chairman of the British Olympic Association, and was Chairman of The London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games and Paralympic Game Limited having previously been Chairman of London 2012 Limited, the London 2012 bid company.  In 2017, he became Chancellor of Loughborough University having previously as served as Pro Chancellor of the university.

Sukhsimranjit Singh practices, teaches, and trains in dispute resolution. He is the Judge Danny Weinstein Managing Director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution and assistant professor of law and practice at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law where he also directs the LLM program in dispute resolution. He specializes in cross-cultural dispute resolution and has published numerous articles in that field, and in 2015 he delivered a TED Talk on cross-cultural communications in Salem, Oregon. He has mediated intercultural and commercial cases in the United States, India, and Canada, among other countries. An Honorary Fellow with the International Academy of Mediators, he is also a council member of the Section of Dispute Resolution of the American Bar Association and board member at Weinstein International Foundation. He has trained lawyers and law students in more than 30 states and 22 countries. Singh obtained his Ph.D. from National Law University, Delhi, master of laws in dispute resolution from University of Missouri-Columbia and was a Fellow at the Dispute Resolution Institute at Hamline University School of Law. An avid reader and an amateur photographer, he loves to travel with his family. He is passionate for music, sports, and interacting with new cultures.