litigator to mediator
By Bruce Keplinger, Jay Daugherty Mediation & Arbitration
"When you are on the way to court with your accuser, try to settle the matter before you get there ..." Luke 12:58 (NLT)
I. Introduction
There is a time early in life when everyone ponders the question, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" For me, the answer was clear — I wanted to be a lawyer like Robert Karr, a very prominent person in my hometown of Girard. Everybody in Girard liked Bob Karr. He supported many community activities, but what I most remember is that Mr. Karr and his wife Dorothy maintained a basketball court in their backyard and, in typical small town Kansas fashion, left their back door unlocked with a basketball inside the door so that we kids could play any time we wanted. They even kept the lights on for the court each evening. When I did my eight grade careers notebook, I interviewed Bob Karr and wrote that I wanted to be like him.
That vision never really wavered, and I passed the Kansas bar exam in August 1977.1 had my first jury trial in Saline
County in the Fall of 1977 and over the next 46 years was a part of about 200 trials, with about 150 of them as first chair. I never considered any change in that career course until my phone rang in 2001 and I was asked if I was interested in being considered for the federal bench. President George W. Bush had been elected and there was a vacancy in Kansas. That led to my being in the West Wing for an interview with Alberto Gonzales about a month before 9/11, which was a pretty cool experience. The fact that President Bush ultimately selected my friend Julie Robinson for that vacancy was briefly disappointing. I returned to my upcoming trial settings and found joy in those. Another career change next came to mind in 2014 when a Johnson County jury returned a large verdict against my physician client. (I'm sure that my opponents, Scott Nutter and Daniel Singer, had no such misgivings.)[1]But the career change that I eventually made was to become a neutral.
On April 30, 2022,1 left my active trial practice. In June of that year, I turned my focus to being a neutral, usually as a mediator. Over my career I have observed several other very able trial practitioners and judges successfully transition to be very able mediators. As I completed my biblically prescribed three score and ten years[2]1 wondered if such a change would be good for me. Would my skills, training, and experience transfer from one practice to the other? I decided to make the change. After making it many practitioners have asked me about the transition. They asked me how I made the change, how difficult it was, what skill sets transferred from my former practice to my current one, and whether I enjoyed my new role. This article attempts to summarize the answers to those questions.
In their excellent book The Einsteinian Revolution[3]Gutfreund and Renn discuss what they...
