Dedicate to Collaborate

There's nothing quite like the moment where a perfectly lovely family dinner takes a turn for the tense. Whether it's a political disagreement, old hurts resurfacing, or just the very logical result of a bunch of tired, stressed people getting up close and personal, it's never fun to have the conversation devolve. Depending on how your family deals...

You know what it's like when you're newly in love: you feel like you would do absolutely anything for your partner. What does it matter if you're a high flyer and he's earning peanuts? Love means unconditional support, right? Right! At least for a while. Then life gets in the way; love can fade and responsibilities tend to grow. Suddenly that discr...

If you've never been to mediation, you might not be totally sure what you actually get out of the whole process. For instance, is it just someone to scribe your agreements? Is it just a conversation? What do you actually get out of the whole process? There's so much more to mediation –– and many of the "end products" that mediators can provide actu...

It's a hazard of the job – people tend to come to me with some very strange ideas of what mediation actually entails. Some people have the idea that it's basically just lawyers doing typical lawyer things, like a kind of court-lite. Others come in with the idea that we're going to just talk and talk until we grind everyone in the room down to a com...

"We need to talk." These may be the four most feared words in the English language. Because as we all know from experience, what happens next is usually pretty ugly. You know how it goes: Say you've got a big deadline at work. On Monday, you asked your partner for help cleaning up this week. On Thursday, you come home late and tired to three days w...

You'd think that when it comes down to it, a fight is a fight is a fight. No matter what you call it, you've still got two sides trying to get their needs met, two people not getting what they want, and one big problem to be solved, right? Actually ... wrong. A disagreement is different from a conflict, which is again different from a dispute – ​ a...

Imagine for a minute that it's 200 years ago. We have the medical technology to do surgery, and survival rates are OK. But surgery always involves a great deal of violence to the body. A simple thing like removing an inflamed appendix might mean that you have to open up a person's abdomen entirely, rather than making the tiny incision required toda...

Figuring out a solution to a complex conflict is almost never totally straightforward, never mind easy or fun. (After all, it's called dispute resolution for a reason.) But some conflicts are more complicated than others simply because of the factors involved. Situations in which spouses are living in real estate purchased by their soon- to-be-ex's...

Imagine that it's 1991. I've just graduated law school, passed the bar, and am tearing up the courtrooms like nobody's business. Divorce cases? Settled. Custody hearings? Taken care of. Business disputes? Done and done. I'd gone into law with an absolute passion for protecting my clients. I'm an advocate right down to my bones — there's nothing I l...

This spring I had the great honor of receiving a Women of Achievement Iris Award — a wonderful tradition of celebrating women leaders in my area. As I stood on the stage, surrounded by women who've shaped not only the community I live in, but their industries as a whole, I was so grateful to be a small part of a much bigger movement. Because while ...