I have a mediation partner, Jeff Oppenheim. He is a busy family and business-focused attorney, and the person who urged me into mediation years ago. Wonderful guy, as honest and forthright as they come.

Jeff has called on me at different times to wear a few hats: construction expert, mediator, negotiator. We have taken to mediating together in the volunteer mediation program in our local court system on Cape Cod, and we recently had our first serious professional co-mediation experience together. It was a construction dispute. To complicate things, the builder and the couple involved were old friends. We learned a BIG thing the hard way, but we learned it.

We were trying to stay as neutral as we could, per most mediation training, although the deepest, heart-level mediation training urges one to stretch the neutral envelope. Anyway, one of the clients did their best to control the whole process, which ended up lasting for weeks. This person was the elephant in the living room who was demanding everyone’s attention while basically claiming innocence for any of the problems they were currently embroiled in. Oy, this was a tough cookie!

We finally got a settlement, but it was not pretty. And here is the big lesson we learned: We did not stake our own claim firmly enough at the very beginning regarding the process of how we work best. The “shoulda” is that we now know to tell prospective clients from the outset that in order to work best we need to be able to tell them if we think they are hurting their own case. We need to be able to tell them what we see. Traditional mediation training warns against this, but you need to make the process your own, too.

We may feel it necessary to say things they may not like. They can choose to accept what we say, stop the whole thing, walk away in a huff; it is up to them, but we need to establish this playing field. We did not do this with the above-mentioned clients, with some painful results. Sometimes you can accomplish this “reality testing” with respectful questions and reflection, but sometimes I think the message needs to be a little more blunt. We can soften the possible blow and stay respectful by asking their permission to be blunt.

So this difficult client was, in fact, a huge gift to us, even though in hindsight we can see how better to serve them.