How To Make Money as a Mediator (And Create Value for Everyone)

30 Top Mediators Share Secrets to Building a Successful Practice

Jeffrey Krivis, Naomi Lucks

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118046999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Alternative Dispute Resolution
• Index: Law

How to Make Money as a Mediator (and Create Value for Everyone) is an invaluable and inspirational resource filled with practical, proven, and down-to-earth information on how you can develop a satisfying and lucrative career as a mediator, no matter what your area of interest—labor and employment mediation, intellectual property, environment, personal injury, family and divorce, contract, securities, or international peacekeeping.

1

Extreme Mediation What Top-Tier Mediators Know That You Can Learn

I am as excited about my 3,700th mediation as I was about my first. This is a bring-your-A-game business. You have to be as strong on Friday as you are on Monday. If you make them know you are glad to see them and psyched for the task at hand, they’ll be back.

Eric Galton

You’re a natural: you know in your bones how to bring a room full of chaos and conflict to harmonious closure, and you just keep getting better and better. You’ve been a professional mediator for a while now, and there doesn’t seem to be an upper limit to your improvement. You love what you do, and people want to be around you—you radiate energy. They’ll even pay a lot of money to work with you and learn from you. You don’t have to think about it: life is good. There’s nothing else you would rather be doing.

This is how every single top-tier mediator I know experiences his or her profession. If this is how mediation makes you feel, you’ve got a real shot. But please note: these super-successful mediators are standing at the top of a pyramid that has a very broad base.

You’ve probably heard the 80-20 rule: 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. That’s as valid in mediation as it is anywhere, and perhaps more so. In mediation—whether it’s commercial, employment, family law, dispute resolution, or any another specialty—the mediators on the bottom tier of the pyramid are constantly scrambling for work, losing heart, and returning to their former careers or searching for a new path. Those who do manage to rise up to the small middle tier—about 15 percent—stay busy, make a good living, but never quite break through. Meanwhile, the top 5 percent—for our purposes, the highest earners in a given region—have calendars that are filled months in advance and bank accounts that are bulging at the seams.

You Gotta Have Heart

You’ve got to have fun doing it. You have to have a passion. You put your energy where your heart is. You put your treasure where your heart is. If your interest is truly there, you put your resources there. Money will not give you a mediation business. It requires your time and effort in interacting with other people.

Robert Jenks

Some of this success depends on one’s niche. It’s no surprise that mediators who work primarily on panels or part-time or in family law or neighborhood disputes are unlikely ever to see the kind of money that a full-time mediator who settles multiparty construction cases brings in regularly—even if their negotiation skills and personalities are in every other way equal. That may not seem fair, but—at least for now—that’s the way the mediation market is set up.

Mediation is an extreme career. Many describe it as a calling. It’s a field in which you can be wildly successful—think Tiger Woods, Martina Navritolova, Lance Armstrong—but only a relative few make it to that top tier and thrive. Those who do can’t imagine doing anything else. Like Paul Monicatti of Michigan, they say, “Mediation is my passion, and it is also so much fun for me that if I didn’t have to pay bills, I’d do it for free.”

If you can say the same, then you’ve found your calling as a mediator. If you don’t have the energy, the love, the passion for mediation that the top people have, the truth is that you’ll probably never join them.

FALLING OFF THE MEDIATOR BANDWAGON

It seems as though everybody wants to jump on the mediator bandwagon these days. As New Orleans mediator Robert Jenks says wryly, “You can’t swing a cat without hitting a mediator, but you can swing a lot of cats without hitting a good mediator.” Toronto’s Cliff Hendler agrees: “Virtually every lawyer who appears before me in mediation says, ‘I could do that.’ ” And in Minnesota, Michael Landrum says, “I can’t remember the last time I was in a mediation when one of the lawyers didn’t say, ‘Well, I’m a mediator too!’ ” I, too, have had this experience many times over.

Not surprisingly, our profession is packed with people who are trying to get a piece of the ever-expanding mediation pie. If you’re a mediator, you’ve probably been through at least some basic mediation training. The number of trainers and programs seems to be exploding, and they are turning out hopeful new mediators almost daily. For many would-be mediators, this career choice seems like a no-brainer. Unlike the person getting a credential to become a teacher or a law degree to become a lawyer, or putting in years of study to become a doctor, you don’t need years of dedicated schooling and a special degree to set up a practice. And look at the payoff: the most successful mediators are shining examples of what might be—they’re making a lot of money, they seem to enjoy their work, and they make it look easy.

Only a Few Survive

The mediation pie can expand, but the number of people eating that pie expands geometrically. So if business doubles, we’ve got quadruple the number of people wanting to be mediators. But only a small number of people are going to sustain themselves as mediators long term in the private sector. The volume of people interested in being mediators is always going to exceed the number who are really able to do it.

I think too many people go out there and train as a source of income—and you can make an okay amount of money. If people are taking the training to skill enhance, that’s fine. But I get a résumé once a week from a person who says, “I’ve just been through mediation training; I want to get into this field. Do you have any jobs for me? If you don’t, can you give me advice?” And I do give them advice. But the truth is, making a good living in mediation is a very difficult thing to do.

Robert A. Creo

Crash! Most of the freshly minted newcomers who burst out of basic programs raring to go stumble at the first gate. What they’re stumbling over is their own skewed idea of the reality of a mediator’s life and what it takes to achieve success.

The first hard lesson newcomers learn is that experience and success count for a lot in this business, and they have yet to acquire it. Southern California mediator Nina Meierding says, “I receive dozens of calls from people who want to ‘take me out to lunch’ so that I can tell them how to be an instant success. The brutal reality is that there is no instant success—it takes commitment, a healthy dose of risk tolerance, a solid business perspective, and faith in yourself.” Chris Moore, who specializes in dispute resolution at CDR Associates in Boulder, Colorado, says, “One of the things that makes the biggest difference is a track record. Which means that it’s harder for a new mediator to leap in and have a successful business. You need to estimate that it’s going to be about five years before you have a sustainable practice—if you get there.”

Field of Dreams

I, too, initially had the Field of Dreams approach: “If I build it (mediation), they (the public) will come.” I believed that the concept of mediation was so good and so right that anyone would immediately see its value. This is not true. The need for mediation is greater than the demand; and if you are to make your career in mediation, you must be strategic, thoughtful, thorough, and self-evaluative in your approach.

Nina Meierding

Five years?

For Geoff Sharp, a successful commercial mediator in Wellington, New Zealand, the first few years were anything but glamorous. “My story,” he says, “involves lonely days at the afternoon movies in my first year of practice, wearing suits to an empty office and putting the kids’ school fees on Visa. Seven years later it involves doing rewarding work in my chosen field and telling wannabe mediators to get staunch, do the hard yards, and realize this is no ordinary profession with established pathways to practice.”

Getting a track record of successful settlements entails having clients—and that means courting contacts, and that means getting out there and doing the hard marketing: selling yourself, but in the most effective and personable way possible. And, for many, it also means learning how to run a business and keep it going on a very short shoestring. Often it means working more hours than you sleep and staying sharp enough to do it all again the next day.

The majority of people who say, “Hey, I could do that!” and complete a forty-hour basic mediation course quickly discover that making a living in this profession is not nearly as easy as it looks from the outside. In fact, it’s not easy at all. Sooner or later, those for whom the hard work outweighs the fun drop away.

NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

As the old saying goes, “Many are called; few are chosen.” Pursuing a truly successful mediation career is not for the faint of heart. As Geoff Sharp says, mediation is no ordinary profession—and there is no one golden road to success, financial or otherwise. Each of the relative handful of super-successful mediators has his or her own road story to tell. Some left successful litigation practices because helping people resolve disputes without rancor felt better than arguing one side over the other. Philadelphia lawyer-turned-mediator Ben Picker recalls, “I became a lawyer primarily because of my desire to work with individuals in a collaborative effort to solve their problems. Until I began my mediation practice, the greatest satisfaction I received from the practice of law was from my work on public interest and pro bono matters. As a mediator, far more so than when I was a trial lawyer, I engage in a collaborative effort to solve problems and in a process where the people are as important as the issues. As a consequence, I feel more than at any other time in my professional life that I am adding value to the profession.”

Some, like former insurance professional Cliff Hendler, left actuarial or accounting careers because they found a truer calling in working with people around the same issues they used to resolve on paper. Others, like Chris Moore’s business partner Bernie Mayer, found their way to mediation and dispute resolution from the helping professions—teaching, social work, psychotherapy—bringing their training and sensibilities to resolving personal or community disputes or to working with social issues on a larger scale.

All, however, have what has been called a “unique ability” for mediation. They are passionate about what they do, and doing it comes naturally. If you agree with all—not merely most—of the following statements, you’re echoing the feelings of every top-tier mediator I know:

• I love mediating, and I’m energized by it.

• It’s easy. When I’m in the ...