Author name: Ron

Last week, while co-mediating a complicated landlord-tenant dispute, we watched a woman who had been treated appallingly by a property management company find her power. We could not provide her with any legal advice and didn’t. Eventually, after caucusing with both parties, we re-assembled in the main virtual room. But when this diminutive, disabled woman […]

The little white girl looked very sweet. I was a substitute teacher in a 3rd grade San Bernardino classroom, and she was sitting in the first row. I turned towards the blackboard, but something made me turn around and check what was going on behind me. There she was smiling innocently, but I couldn’t shake

Let Magnum Mediation resolve your conflicts confidentially, inexpensively, comprehensively, and virtually. 2 articles March 15, 2023 Somebody I don’t like suggested I become a mediator. I had just retired from 13 years of teaching English in a high-conflict continuation high school in southern California, and she just blurted it out. Even offered to pay my

The best way to play Scrabble is to make sure you have a high turnover of letters. That way you stand the best chance of making a better word. When I was an actor, as long as I kept getting auditions, I increased my chances of getting a job. Starting out as a mediator, I

Conflict has been a large part of my professional life since retiring as an actor. I spent 13 years as a teacher in a continuation high school where high school students who have fallen behind in credits come to make up those credits and graduate. When arguments or fights were imminent, I would take them

I can’t say I was a great actor or even a good one. I have to leave that to other people. But I worked. Stage, Film, TV, Commercials, Radio. Twenty-five years of getting paid to pretend to be other people. Since the essence of drama is conflict, many of the people I played were in

Last week I wrote about a mediation in which it became apparent that the Respondent was, according to the Petitioner, schizophrenic. Neither I nor the Petitioner were qualified to make that diagnosis and it wasn’t until the Respondent began claiming that the Petitioner was making her house shake at all hours and that was the

I was recently asked to be a volunteer mediator for the University of Southern California Program on Mediation Advocacy. It was an invigorating experience, working on a seven-party environmental dispute. I had never worked with those numbers before and never conducted a mediation on an environmental dispute. In fact, I had only recently retired as