Variations in Mediation: How - and Why - Legal Mediators Change Styles in the Course of a Case

I will seek to show in this article that professional legal mediators in fact use a variety of styles, and that they change their approach constantly during a single mediation, even within a single meeting with a disputant. I will argue that these stylistic changes are the norm rather than the exception in the mediation of civil legal disputes and that the use of evaluative techniques is also frequent, even among those mediators who favor a broad, facilitative approach. Finally, I will describe the contrasting styles that the filmed mediators used in the same dispute and argue that these variations were caused less by the inherent tendencies of the mediators than by differences in the tactics and personalities of the disputants with whom they interacted.