Bernadette BoasExecutive Leadership Coach, Trainer and Speaker, Ball of Fire Coaching · Become the Leader Everyone Wants to Follow and No One Can Overlook.

Legal Resolution: Ask Your Lawyer About Options Beyond Court!

26 Jun 2026 · 2 min

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1:49

In this informational segment, former trial lawyer and current neutral mediator advises clients to proactively prime themselves to ask their lawyers about resolution options beyond litigation. She emphasizes that most parties ultimately seek resolution, not courtroom battles, and that lawyers should help clients reflect on past events while focusing on future desired outcomes. The speaker highlights the universal human tendency to react emotionally to conflict, urging a pause to identify the true underlying dispute. She advocates for early mediation—before positions become entrenched—to allow all parties, possibly more than two, to clarify the real conflict and understand why it exists. By engaging a neutral third party early, disputants can uncover the core issues and pursue a more effective, collaborative resolution process.

Chapters

Oftentimes once you've sought legal counsel, you are really— what I like to talk about is priming yourself to ask the right questions of your lawyer. Like, what are my options to resolution? And in that conversation, if it's not raised initially, because I used to be a trial lawyer, I used to think if you came into my office with a problem, you wanted me to defend you or to prosecute your case. And the reality is all the parties really want is resolution. And what they oftentimes need a lawyer to do is help them take a glimpse at the rearview mirror and understand what happened in the past, but take a moment to look forward and say, what is it that I really want out of this process? And it is a process for resolution because you don't want to go all the way to— and so I think one of the things we talked about before we went on camera is We are all human and we all react to conflict very similarly initially, unless we're able to step outside of that initial reaction and say, let me think about this for a second. Right? What matters is you gotta have a conversation about the real conflict and both sides or all sides, if there's more than two parties, really need to understand what that true conflict is. And that's why I like what I'm a big proponent of is an early mediation before positions harden, before you escalate your commitment to your view, and you seek out a third party like myself who's a neutral to engage in a process which allows the disputants to figure out what it is they're really fighting about and why the conflict exists in the first place.