ADR Educational Materials

ADR Educational Materials

The JAMS Foundation offers teaching and training resources to law professors, ADR instructors, and trainers in order to introduce students to dispute resolution concepts and techniques. The following materials are currently available from the JAMS Foundation.

Mediating a Sexual Harassment Case: What Would You Do?: A series of brief vignettes simulating the mediation of an employment dispute and raising issues and challenges that can arise in the course of mediation. The video does not advocate a particular approach to mediation, leaving it to the viewer to determine how to respond to the questions and issues presented. An accompanying Teaching Guide includes a detailed script of the video, role play exercise, and separate training components for mediators and for attorney advocates in mediation.

Skills of a Legal Mediator: Demonstrates specific techniques used by commercial mediators to resolve cases. Centering on an international commercial dispute, the video highlights skills ranging from active listening and reframing to decision analysis, mediator proposals, range bargaining, and confidential listening, allowing teachers and students to focus on specific issues, techniques or stages of the mediation process. Includes written role play information.

How to Borrow a Mediator’s Powers: Effective Advocacy in Settlement: Shows experienced litigators representing clients in the mediation of a commercial contract dispute. Comprised of twenty-three chapters, each showing a different stage or technique of mediation advocacy. Includes written role-play information.

Negotiating a Discrimination Claim:  Demonstrates a negotiation to resolve a sexual-harassment-in-employment claim. The video is filmed in the way lawyers bargain: in six bargaining sessions and five client consultations conducted in person, by telephone and through emails. Organized in twenty-one chapters, each focusing on a specific phase of the negotiation process. Includes written role-play information.

Diversity in Mediation Practice (“Ceiling Collapse” and “Shanghai Technology Partners v. Green Consulting”): Intended to promote diversity in the teaching of mediation as well as demonstrating mediation practice at the highest level, two videos featuring highly successful commercial mediators demonstrating a variety of approaches for dealing with difficult parties and counsel, facilitating effective exchanges of information, and addressing cultural and ethical issues that arise in many complex commercial disputes.  Includes written role-play information.

Termination Tempest – Mediating an Age Discrimination Case: Margaret Shaw mediates an age-discrimination-in-employment claim by a salesman against a small restaurant supply company.  The video demonstrates a range of facilitative techniques and evaluation of bargaining options, combining genuine empathy with firm management of the mediation process to foster an interest-based settlement, while dealing with parties’ mutual demands for apology and lawyers’ aggressive positional bargaining.

These materials are available at no cost only to instructors intending to use them in educational settings and are not currently available for personal use.