Client Skills Board Competitions Update

The Client Skills Board would like to congratulate the MULS teams and their coaches for a fine showing at a number of different competitions over the past three weeks.

Elizabeth Larson and Melissa Fischer won the ABA Representation in Mediation Regional Competition at the John Marshall Law School on February 16th. Yay, team! They will advance to the ABA Representation in Mediation National Competition in Miami in April so please wish them luck.

At the same competition, Emil Ovbiagele and Kavin Tedamrongwanish finished 9th overall. Carin Steber traveled with the teams and provided important on-site coaching assistance.

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The Value of Trial Experience to a Young Lawyer

As a new lawyer, I struggled to come up with blog topics. Being only two years out of law school, I don’t pretend to have near the amount of knowledge or experience as the frequent contributors and readers of this blog. I contemplated a post about the recent United States Supreme Court decision in Missouri v. McNeely, but Dean O’Hear would cover that topic in a much more eloquent and researched fashion. I then contemplated a post about the privacy implications regarding the recent news on the NSA collecting phone records (or even more recently—the criminal defendants demanding the records as exculpatory evidence). However, as a past student of Professor Boyden’s Law of Privacy class, I’m inclined to believe his post on that issue would make a much more interesting read. I finally decided on a topic that has monopolized my attention this Spring and Summer: jury trials. While a post on jury trials authored by Professor Blinka would likely be deemed so sage as to be cited by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, I’ll tackle the area from what I’ve learned as a new lawyer.

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Israel Reflections 2013–Is Trust Necessary?

At the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution Annual Meeting last week, Senator George Mitchell spoke about Northern Ireland and how important hope and patience is for a peace process. On the other hand, and contrary to much that we read about in negotiation, he did not argue that trust is needed. Several of our speakers in Israel spoke about this as well.  The following blog from Nick Grode picks up on this theme:

Having returned from Israel, I find myself reflecting on what I have learned.  One of the most interesting lessons centers on the role of trust in conflict resolution.  While in Israel I had the pleasure of listening to Gershon Baskin [Baskin negotiated the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli solider held by Hamas for five years] and Moty Cristal [Cristal was last year’s ABA keynote speaker, a well-known negotiation expert involved in numerous Israeli-Palestinian issues] speak about the Middle East conflict.  Both commented on the lack of trust between the Israeli and Palestinian governments.

Interestingly, neither saw this lack of trust as a bar to peace. 

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