If you haven’t been following the NFL labor situation, the sides are fighting over the biggest pot of professional sports money in America. George Cohen, head of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, mediated a brief and ultimately fruitless attempt to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the players’ union earlier this spring. When the old one expired, the union decertified, saying it no longer represented players in bargaining under labor law. The owners locked the players out, whereupon the players brought suit in federal court for antitrust violations. The owners claim the decertification was a sham and the players should return to collective bargaining.

As the parties await the district court ruling on the union’s motion for an injunction lifting the lockout, they are contemplating resuming some form of ADR. The owners want to go back to Cohen, while the players fear going before Cohen could create a perception that they are still functioning as a union. In addition, according to the Times, the players say they want to be before a neutral appointed by the federal court because the federal court has the power “to compel the parties to negotiate.” What the players really seem to want is a settlement conference. They want the dispute resolved in a litigation setting in order to reinforce the legality of their decertification and to take advantage of the legal arm-twisting common in court-connected mediation. The owners want it resolved in a labor mediation setting where an interest-based give-and-take is the norm. It’s an interesting case in which the dispute resolution process is intimately tied in with the legal rights, so that the choice of a process has a direct effect on the strength of the parties’ BATNAs.

USA Today calls the disagreement “bickering over semantics,” but dispute resolution pros know that these are distinctions with real differences.