I was really pleased to meet Randall Kiser at last year’s ABA conference. I was very impressed by his important study (co-authored with Martin Asher and Blakeley McShane), Let’s Not Make a Deal: An Empirical Examination of Decision Making in Unsuccessful Negotiations. The top-line finding was that in 85.5% of cases, parties went to trial … Continue reading Kiser’s Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer
After I attended the orientation on Friday for the LLM Program at my school, I sent an email to the students suggesting some resources that they might be interested in. It occurred to me that other faculty may want to send a similar message to your students. I adapted the message, below, and you may … Continue reading Message for Students Interested in ADR
In this mini-course so far, we have noted that qualitative research can be cool and insightful, learning can be more fun, and there are tons of things that you might want to know and you want your students to know. Today, we will consider how to frame questions to get the most valid possible information … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: Good Questions
From TFOI Jim Coben: Dear Colleagues, Beginning in summer 2013, Donna Steinstra and I have co-edited Research Insights, a regular column in the American Bar Association’s Dispute Resolution Magazine (DRM). Twice a year we choose 10-12 empirical research studies relevant to ADR professionals and publish the citation and abstract. To compile the longer list from … Continue reading Great Bibliography of Recent Empirical Research on ADR
In a recent post in this mini-course, I highlighted several impressive studies relying on qualitative data. This post follows up the one describing how you and your students can get great joy from doing Stone Soup interviews and focus groups. This post uses my research to demonstrate that qualitative studies are readily do-able by you … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: My Students and I Can Do This!
We want to let you know that we have created a Stone Soup website and listserv. The website collects materials in one place for easy access. The listserv’s goal is to promote communication between people interested in the Stone Soup Project. We have been in touch with a lot of faculty who said that they … Continue reading Stone Soup Website and Listserv
Have you ever felt really excited when you had an “aha” moment of insight? I bet that virtually all readers of this blog have had that experience numbers of times. Sometimes this can come from doing a simulation as part of a training, when you “get” the potential of something you had never considered before, … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: The Joy of Learning
You have certainly heard many lawyer jokes, some of which are pretty funny. But have you ever thought of them as data for a scientific study? Marc Galanter did. He’s a Wisconsin law professor and giant in our DR field. In a recent post in this Stone Soup mini-course, I summarized some cool qualitative studies. … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: Galanter’s Use of Lawyer Jokes as Data
The last lesson in the Stone Soup mini-course cautioned about having exaggerated confidence in quantitative research about dispute resolution. This lesson is intended as an antidote to unwarranted skepticism about qualitative research by describing some examples of great qualitative research. Both types of methods are valuable, especially when used in combination. I focus particularly on … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: Cool Qualitative Research
I know (?) that this sounds like another one of my dumb questions. But since academics and other professionals are in the knowledge business, it’s worth our considering the question, which we will discuss in this installment of the Stone Soup mini-course. We all know that 2+2=4, Google is a search engine, and murder is … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: What Is Knowledge?
