Dispute Settlement Counsel

Business disputes, especially those involving small closely held or family businesses, almost always include relationships that are ongoing and need to be preserved, and often arise out of issues and unmet interests and needs that lie beneath the surface of the stated positions. 

For these reasons and others set out below, Collaborative Law and other non-adversarial approaches designed to resolve business dispute early have been providing value to parties who have used these methods to solve their disputes.  In addition to the need to keep business relationships healthy, there are other practical reasons that favor the use of a collaborative process and approach: cost and time efficiency, confidentiality, and the ability for the parties to determine their own options for resolution.  For family businesses, mission-based, non-profit organizations, entrepreneurial and social enterprise businesses, the cost, time spent and collateral damage of the litigation process would be devastating to their business goals, operations and budgets.  Collaborative process approaches have delivered good results.  

Consider the time differences in business or employment disputes that have been resolved by a collaborative process as opposed to traditional litigation. Recent cases such as partnership breakups, contractor-subcontractor disputes, disputes between businesses and independent contractors have used interest-based dispute resolution processes successfully and have resolved the disputes in 3 to 6 months. 

The legal fees in collaborative cases have been a small percentage of what protracted litigation would have cost.  Collaborative lawyers have begun to utilize flat rate billing methods that allow the clients to budget for the cost of the resolution process, compared to runaway hourly rates.  In addition, the costs of collaborative processes have been negligible, because they do not include the costs of court filing and service fees, deposition transcripts and electronic discovery.  If experts are used in the collaborative process, they are jointly retained and the parties equally share the cost of each neutral expert, rather than each party having to pay for its own expert.         

Another proven value has been that of “preventive savings”:  Collaborative cases, similar to mediation, avoid the need for the client to mobilize a small army of employees to take time away from working to respond to discovery requests.  Nor will employees have to be taken away from their work to draft affidavits, prepare for and have their depositions taken, and then possibly go through the same process to prepare for trial.  By keeping the process confidential and civil in nature and built around respectful and principled settlement negotiation sessions, it has also easier to prevent the non-productive polarizing of the workplace into camps. Businesses need to have their employees, independent contractors and subcontractors focused on the business, not on some protracted adversarial process that runs alongside and distracts the business for years, interfering often with business efficiency and draining its resources.  Collaborative processes allow businesses and organizations to do that, while systematically working through the settlement negotiations and reaching a resolution the clients tailor to meet their needs