Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 8, 2002

Worth repeating

Carrie Menkel-Meadow of Georgetown University Law Center delivered the Sibley Lecture at the School of Law April 1. She called her presentation “A Need for a New Kind of Lawyering.” Some excerpts:
“The theme of my life has been to think about lawyering in a deeper, more problem-solving way we typically conceive of it in an adversarial way. . . . Are we ultimately cooperators or competitors? What is the basic nature of man (and woman, of course)? Do we try to help each other or do we try to beat each other? Much of my career has been to try to get lawyers to consider the cooperative search for social justice as opposed to thinking that we must always beat the other side in other to win. . . .
“Lawyers, in my view, need a whole host of new skills in order to be effective lawyers in the 21st century. . . . Many legal disputes no longer have one party or another--they have multi-parties. . . . Even the simplest tort case is now going to have three parties to it: the plaintiff, the defendant, and the insurance company, the company that is actually going to pay the bill. So in negotiating settlements, or even thinking about bringing cases to court, it is very important to consider who all the parties are that might have an interest or stake in the dispute.
“Once we recognize that there are more than two parties to a dispute, one lawyering function may be to be a representative of one of the two parties, but another function of a lawyer might be to coordinate the action between the parties. . . .”

--Beth Roberts

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