NIACR: You’ve touched a little bit on this already, but one of the first things that struck me when I read the book was its cross-disciplinary content. Can you elaborate on the importance of these cross-disciplinary influences in the field of dispute resolution?

Moffitt: I think we are at a stage in the field where… we are at something of a defining moment in the field. I think there is an opportunity in our field to really move ahead in important ways, and I think that will only happen with cross-disciplinary work. I think that each individual discipline has said much of what it has to say about dispute resolution. Law has said a lot about dispute resolution and so has psychology, and so have economists, and so have ethicists. I think the really interesting conversations now, and the really interesting opportunities for advancing the field, are conversations between two or more of those disciplines. I think one of the strengths of PON [Editor’s note: "PON" is the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School.] as an umbrella organization, is that it gathers together people who are from different disciplines around this common topic, and we’ve done similar things here in Oregon. We have a masters’ program now in dispute resolution that is cross-disciplinary so that people will take courses from philosophers and economists and therapists and lawyers because that, it seems to me, is where the field is heading. I think the interesting and important work in dispute resolution in the future, is not the kind of work that one kind of person alone can solve and so I think this sort of cross-disciplinary look is just critical.

Bordone: I would agree with everything Michael says and simply add that, certainly for me one of the attractions of this field as a student, on the intellectual side, was that it was interdisciplinary. And one of the continuing ways that I find myself constantly engaged here at PON is the fact that I’m constantly bumping up against people whose academic studies approach the materials in a way quite different from my own. And I also think that, again from the point of a view of a practitioner, it is critically important that whether this book is going to be read by a lawyer or a therapist or a diplomat or a business person, that they be exposed to the full array of disciplinary approaches to the field in a way that it is understandable to them and useful to them. I think that for a business person it is really important to read Lax and Sebenius’ The Manager as Negotiator. But if they end there, that’s not sufficient. For a lawyer it’s really important to read Beyond Winning by Bob Mnookin. But that’s not sufficient. I think for anyone who really wants to understand this field, they need to at least have a sort of operating literacy of how other disciplinary approaches and other perspectives are approaching this material. I think that’s really key.

NIACR: There is a statement that you wrote in the first chapter of your book that says, "There is no particular method of resolving disputes that is consistently superior to any other." Do you think there is a problem today in the field that some practitioners have become too invested in advocating certain approaches to dispute resolution to the exclusion of others?

Moffitt: Yes. I could say more about that but yeah, I do. I think it’s understandable and it may not even be an awful thing that we have dispute resolution practitioners out there advocating for a particular method or promoting the benefits of a particular method. I think the risk to the field comes when any dispute resolution professional or practitioner advocates a particular dispute resolution method and, in doing so, over sells it. I think that there is real value in people who want to promote mediation going out and saying that mediation is good at repairing relationships, at discovering value creating opportunities, and so on and so forth. But, I think we have to be responsible in explaining mediation’s benefits and its potential costs to the consuming public. I don’t think we can go out and say to the public, "If you go to mediation you will loose weight and grow thicker hair and be happier and live longer." I think at some point we need to have an honest conversation about the limits of any of these methods of dispute resolution, and I would say the same to my litigator friends who seem desperately in love with the trial, and with my friends who are arbitrators who think that is just the best way. You know, each of them is right, sometimes. And I think we would be doing a disservice if we are not explicit about the "sometimes" part of that statement.

Bordone: I would basically endorse everything Michael said. I think that the field of ADR, at least in law, largely started in sort of reaction against the one-size fits all litigation approach, and I think the danger to the field now is that you have mediation zealots or ADR zealots. So there are still a lot of people out there who just want to litigate, and there also are some people in our field who think mediation is like the ultimate multivitamin that you should take it everyday and it's good for everything, but mediation can do harm. And so part of what we are trying to say in that chapter, and it's an old idea of Frank Sander’s and some of his colleagues and is covered to a degree in one of the chapters that he wrote for the book, is this idea that we should really be diagnosing a dispute. That you should first look at the features of the dispute, and then set a process for managing that dispute to what the symptoms are. And so that would not really elevate one process over another in some general sense, but would say for each particular dispute that there actually may be a process, or combination of processes that would be better than using some other set of processes. So in that sense I think Michael and I would agree that we could look at a particular dispute and say that litigation would be better than mediation, or that for these four issues, an arbitrator would really help and then the other issues can be mediated or negotiated out. So we are not sort of agnostics with respect to a particular dispute, but I think we are with respect to disputes in general. Yes, it’s hard to sort of elevate one process over another as a general, on-going matter.

NIACR: Ok. I also was interested in the chapter you included on online dispute resolution. Do you see an increase role in the future for online dispute resolution?

Bordone: I think the answer to that is definitely yes. Partially because I think there are ways that technology can be used to help parties. An interesting area of research of study and experimentation is to figure out what those ways are. Again, technology for technology’s sake doesn’t necessarily help and can actually be bad. But I think there are ways that we can use it well in our field. So partially, I think the answer is yes because it could be a really good tool, and I think partially the answer is yes, simply because like it or not parties are doing more stuff online. Even if we don’t think it’s a good idea, the likelihood that we are going to stop doing more, that we’re going to stop people from doing things online, I believe is low. Moreover, more commerce is occurring online and so more disputes will be occurring online. So it just seems inevitable to me that this is an area of growth down the road.

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