LAWYER OFFERS MEDIATION SERVICES IN ATTEMPT TO AVOID COURTROOM
By EILEEN KENNEDY, Telegraph Staff
kennedye@telegraph-nh.com
Published: Friday, Feb. 18, 2005
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NASHUA - A local corporate lawyer is now offering businesses a cheaper, less stressful way to solve business disputes than taking a case to court - mediation.
Scott Flegal, who specializes in business law and has a downtown practice at 159 Main St., has opened a new division called Business Mediation Solutions. It’s a way for him to offer companies a less-expensive, less-stressful way to solve those inevitable disputes that crop up in the course of doing business. He began the business in 2003, but will now be devoting more attention to it.
“I have been tinkering with mediating since the late ’90s and making more progress with it,” Flegal said. “I’ve been making steady progress in using it to help my clients.”
He said his style has always been a very collaborative one, compared with the adversarial nature one usually associates with lawyers.
“The important thing to me has always been how do I solve my client’s problem,” Flegal said. “It’s going to be a big educational challenge for us, because we’re a little bit ahead of the curve with mediation.”
While people may have heard it being used in divorce and child-custody cases, they may not think of it as a tool that can be used to settle business disputes as well, he said. These days, it is being used in civil cases in Nashua Superior Court. All civil cases filed there must go to mediation first, then proceed to trial if they cannot be resolved, Flegal said. He believes between 60 and 70 percent of them are settled in the mediation stage.
When Flegal mediates, it does not involve one of his law clients, because that would be a conflict of interest, he said. The point of mediation is to have a neutral party get the parties to talk and then solve their disagreements, he said.
Mediation costs much less and usually takes a lot less time to settle disputes than preparing for a court case and going to trial, Flegal said. He is charging $250 an hour, which is split between the disagreeing parties, and many times is finished in half a work day, as opposed to months and years for court cases, along with thousands of dollars.
“A skilled mediator can keep the parties in the room and talking, trying to solve the dispute,” Flegal said. “Mediation is a good, powerful way to solve disagreements and problems.”
And it’s not just for disputes between companies, a dispute within an organization. He can also educate and train a company’s key employees in problem-solving techniques, or help establish an internal dispute resolution process to manage disagreements within a group, he said.
Flegal has been a court-appointed mediator since 1998, and is a 2004 graduate of the Advanced Mediation Workshop at the Harvard Law School program of instruction for lawyers. He is also a member of the board of directors of the New England Association for Conflict Resolution.
Flegal also writes a monthly column about business and the law for The Telegraph.
He had a law office a few doors down, but a year ago he moved to 159 Main St., where the additional room has allowed him to arrange special areas for the mediation services. He has separate waiting rooms for those participating in the mediation, so, particularly prior to the session, they don’t have to sit together.
Flegal has had his own law firm since 1985.