The Who of Mediation: A New Look at Mediator “Styles”
In 1994, Len Riskin, then the C.A. Leedy Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Director of its Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, inadvertently started a great debate about what “style” of mediation was “best.” When he published the article entitled, Mediator Orientations, Strategies and Techniques , 12 Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation 111 (1994), he described four styles of mediation based on how broadly the mediator defined the problem presented by the parties (and thus the depth of intervention the mediator was likely to take) and the role of the mediator -- either facilitative or evaluative. According to this analytical scheme, a mediator could be: narrow/facilitative, narrow/evaluative, broad/facilitative or broad/evaluative. The two-dimensional grid based on this analysis supposedly predicts the strategies each type of mediator is likely to use, and, Riskin thought at the time, the amount of self-determination the...