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Murphy Desmond mediator knows when to ignore the rules

By: Jane Pribek//December 17, 2012//

Murphy Desmond mediator knows when to ignore the rules

By: Jane Pribek//December 17, 2012//

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Marinus J.W. Petri - Murphy Desmond SC, Madison (Staff Photo by Kevin Harnack)

When all else fails, mediator Marinus “Rick” J.W. Petri isn’t afraid to throw the rule book out the window.

In one such instance, the Murphy Desmond SC lawyer was mediating a case where the parties seemed to get further and further from an agreement. So he brought the parties and counsel together in one room and announced only two rules: no hitting and no swearing.

“All the text books would say ‘Don’t do this,’” Petri said. “We had two guys who hated each other’s guts, yelling back and forth. But believe it or not, that rough-and-tumble interchange actually brought them to an agreement outside the scope of their last best offers.”

The moral of the story, he said: be flexible and always keep an open mind.

“Maybe that’s why they call it alternative dispute resolution,” he said.

Petri first tried mediating in 1999, not long after he’d entered private practice after working for the city of Madison for close to 30 years.

He estimates he’s mediated around 80 cases in the past dozen years and has settled approximately 85 percent.

Often, Petri said, his cases involve disputes where the state is a party, such as condemnation, which fits well with his municipal law background. But Petri will try to settle any type of case, he said.

“I don’t want to be typecast,” he said.

Wisconsin Law Journal: What makes an effective mediator?
Marinus Petri:
You have to have some level of expertise with respect to the legal issues in the case.

But perhaps equally important is getting some measure of what’s important to the parties. That involves analyzing the human components. Human beings have personalities and emotional needs that might be totally irrelevant to the resolution of the case but they end up being very significant in trying to get people to the same place. You have to figure out what the relationship is between the parties and their attorneys. You need to figure out who’s moving things on both sides.

Another interesting aspect is to figure out which issues, that technically have nothing to do with the resolution of the case or a dollar amount, are unspoken but have importance. Sometimes it’s as simple as a personality conflict, where an apology can help get the case settled.

WLJ: Do you consider yourself somewhat evaluative and facilitative then?
Petri:
(Laughs) I hate those labels, and I probably couldn’t even define what the academic construct of those models are. Good mediation doesn’t follow a model. Every mediation is a custom-crafted job. It’s not an assembly-line job. Every good mediator knows that right down to his genes and chromosomes.
Mediation is like being a good cook. You have a bunch of ingredients, but you don’t know what kind of meal you’re going to end up with at the end of the day. You just mix all the ingredients together in a palatable way. And you never follow the same recipe twice.

WLJ: What’s the No. 1 mistake attorneys make in preparing either themselves or their clients for mediation?
Petri:
I honestly don’t know what they do to prepare for mediation. When I walk into a mediation, I don’t even attempt to guess. I just try to feel out the situation as it is presented to me and as it develops over the course of the mediation. I think we sometimes try to plan too much and when we do we close out other options.

WLJ: What’s your definition of success?
Petri:
If you have a dispute, as all of us always will, success means resolving it. I know that’s not a very dramatic answer. But when you think of what is really the leading cause of death — and I don’t necessarily mean physical death but psychological death — it is the inability to let go of situations, let them be and remember that you can only control you, your thoughts and what you do. You can’t control anybody else. That’s especially true in mediation.

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