Mediate Your Clients' Employment Claims

While growing in popularity, mediation still remains underutilized in employment disputes. From the employee's perspective, mediation should be a “no-brainer.” In fact, if the parties cannot amicably resolve the matter themselves, mediation usually should be requested at the outset. While employees often do not have all of the information at that time to prove their discrimination, whistleblower or common-law wrongful discharge claims, plaintiff's counsel can always request as a precondition to mediation that the defendant company produce certain key documents in advance of the mediation. On the other hand, if the company refuses to mediate, that decision could later come back to haunt it when a plaintiff, after successfully prosecuting his or her claims under a fee-shifting statute, makes an application for attorneys' fees.