Judges Will Employ Mediators in Effort to Resolve Disputes : Courts: Legal community is optimistic that volunteer system will help to reduce the backlog of 14,000 civil filings.

In an effort to trim a 14,000-case backlog, judges in the Ventura courts will turn to volunteer mediators to help resolve some of the cases that come before them.

This month, the first cases will enter a new court program which asks parties involved in certain types of civil disputes to meet face to face and, with the aid of a trained mediator, try to reach an agreement without taking up precious court time.

The court is entering an arena previously dominated by private and nonprofit groups and, by doing so, risks forcing existing mediation programs into competition for funding and clients.

Despite this potential conflict, judges, lawyers and mediators are optimistic that court-mandated mediation will alleviate a swollen caseload while introducing litigants to a successful form of dispute resolution.

“We had to find a new and creative way to solve some of the disputes coming into the courthouse,” said Superior Court Judge Richard D. Aldrich, one of the designers of the new program. “Mediation has been effective, and it appeared it could work well here.”

Mediation has been used to settle disputes in Ventura County for several years through private and nonprofit groups, and local mediators say that their form of dispute settlement has been highly successful. Nearly 90% of the roughly 500 cases mediated in Ventura County each year are settled, said Abe Scher, founder of the Pacific Mediation and Negotiation Center in Oxnard. And 95% of agreements reached in mediation are carried out, he said.

In 1990, Ventura County residents created a nonprofit group, Ventura Center for Dispute Settlement, to train volunteer mediators and provide mediation services on a sliding cost scale to make them affordable to all.

Funding has come, in large part, from a state plan that distributes money from court filing fees to alternative forms of dispute resolution. Now, because the Ventura County court has created its new program, some in the nonprofit organization fear it could lose some of the money it needs to continue operation.

“We are thrilled that the court has adopted the idea of using mediation, but (the dispute resolution agency) already shares (the state money) in the Ventura area, and that money is not increasing,” said L. Randolph Lowry, who is a member of the Ventura center’s board of directors.

The Ventura County court has not applied for any state funding, and, at this point the program does not require funding because it is run entirely by volunteers. Wendy Lascher, a Ventura attorney who is involved both in the Ventura center and the court’s new program, said that even if the court does require funding, she does not believe the two programs would vie for the same money.

“I don’t foresee the programs entering some sort of competition,” Lascher said. “Our hope from the beginning has been to see mediation used in this way and there is no reason that these programs can not coexist.”

Alice McGrath, who helped open the Ventura mediation center, said the programs would be able to work in tandem. “This is good for Ventura,” she said, “because the story is getting around that mediation is a good way of resolving a lot of people’s problems.”

In addition, Aldrich said, the new program will help the court handle the massive number of case filings and meet a new state mandate that requires that the court dispose of 90% of new filings within one year.

Each month, according to court officials, 400 new cases are filed in Ventura County Superior Court and 800 new cases are filed in Municipal Court.

“There has been a need,” he said, “to rid the system of cases which sit on the shelf for five years before they finally came to trial.”

Recently, the court finished training the last of 106 volunteers who, starting this month, will begin trying to resolve cases that court officials said are ripe for mediation.

And, while courts can rarely do more than order people to pay money, Lascher said, “Mediators are taught to expand the pie.”

Their solutions have historically been unconventional: In one case, a tenant would not leave his apartment until the landlord could find a home for his dog, which the landlord did; in another, a dispute over a strip of driveway between two homes required only an apology.

Private mediator Scher explained the concept with a parable:

A father walks into his kitchen to find his children deeply engaged in an argument over an orange. Each child has a hand on the fruit and they are tugging it back and forth.

The father immediately steps in to solve the debacle, grabbing the fruit, pulling a sharp knife out of the kitchen drawer and slicing the orange clean in half.

“Now that’s fair,” the father says with pride, handing each child an even share. As he walks out of the kitchen, he notices his son has scooped out the fruit to eat and discarded the peel, while his daughter has discarded the fruit and kept the peel for a cooking project.

“The father acted in a one-dimensional way, much like the courts do,” Scher said. “A mediator would have taken the time to examine what each person wanted out of the situation.”

One element of the program that has raised concern is that until now, mediation has been voluntary. Of the four court systems in California that use mediation, only Ventura County has made it mandatory.

Aldrich said the mandatory aspect of the program should not significantly change its success rates. He said he believes that much of the program’s successes will stem from the fact that it brings the parties together.

“Statewide, it has been a fact that the more times you can get people together to discuss their conflict, the more likely they are to reach a settlement,” he said.

Whether the program succeeds will depend largely on the enthusiasm of the lawyers who bring their cases before the Ventura courts, Judge Aldrich said.

J. Roger Myers, past president of the Ventura County Bar Assn., said the attitude among most attorneys is “wait and see.”

“Any new tool that the court can use to help them handle the case load will probably be helpful,” Myers said. “Everyone’s primary goal is to resolve the conflicts.”

Aldrich is confident the lawyers will come around:

“Lawyers and judges are naturally resistant to change,” he said. “But once they start participating in the process, I think they will be so happy with it they will seek to use it outside of the system.”

That, said Scher, is why he and other mediators from the nonprofit programs have volunteered to hear the court’s cases. Scher said exposure is the one thing mediation has lacked. “The more this process is tried, the more it will be used.”

An important feature of Ventura County’s program, said Florence Prushan, a court administrator, is that the cases sent to mediation are those considered most likely to be resolved by the process.

Cases likely to be sent to a mediator are those involving disputes between neighbors, business dissolutions or partnership disputes, charges of discrimination, property disputes, sexual harassment, wrongful termination, building-code violations, and disputes over covenants, conditions and restrictions.

All of these are similar, Lascher said, in that they have an emotional component.