Mirror Neurons & Mediation Advice

At the Works-in-Progress conference this past week at Arizona State University (great job, Art!), I had the pleasure of hearing from Professor Scott Hughes on his latest work on mirror neurons.  I have blogged about mirror neurons before and their impact on people.  It explains things from why Harley rides are pleasurable to why Starbucks runs smoothly. 

Scott took the next step regarding dispute resolution and discussed how the latest findings in neurobiology can help mediators be more effective.  If the goal of the mediator is to build the relationship and trust with the parties, then, Scott argues, mirroring the physical movements and the emotions of the parties can help do this.  As many of us noted, we already “know” this when we teach mediator skills.  We talk about “modeling” the behavior of the parties and watching body language. 

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Market Opportunity: Unforwardable Emails

I’ve seen a number of news items over the past few years in which internal firm or law school emails get leaked to online legal gossip sites, to the embarrassment of the originating institution. In my view, the frequency with which this occurs indicates a world in transition. Once, there were no online gossip sites worth worrying about, and firm memoranda about salaries, scandals, employment issues, or stolen lunches from the office refrigerator rarely made it past the walls of the institution. Now, there are such sites, and salacious and even mundane internal correspondence regularly leaks to them. This strikes me as a situation that can’t persist in its current form much longer. Either practices will change (i.e., no more emails about firm policies) or some sort of restrictions will be put in place. (A third option, that expectations of confidentiality concerning such matters will evaporate, strikes me as unlikely.)

The latest item to set off this thought in my head was this news item from the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (essentially a slightly more tony version of Above the Law). As I tell my Internet Law students, there are various ways of controlling a behavior such as forwarding emails. Law is one way, but not a likely one in this case. Informal social norms are another (“Give a hoot! Don’t redistribute!”). That seems unlikely here, too. But a third is some sort of technological solution. And here, I would think a technological solution is at least conceivable: an office network that offers, as an option, blocking redistribution of the content of certain emails.

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Global Economic Crisis Having Impact on Pensions in Argentina

Argentinaflag We already know that the global economic crisis is having far-reaching effects in the United States on the 401(k) plans of individuals and may also mean that fewer employers are able to afford offering health plans. Now comes word from foreign countries that have national pension schemes that the economic impact of the collapse is causing governments to invade the money in those national pensions.

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