Gladys' deathbed wishes had been breached. Money from her trust had benefited a second wife.
Joseph died of heart failure in November 2002. Sarah was due a third of his estate, but trustees Edwin and Jan controlled it. Jan's son Donald pored over his late grandfather's financial records. Why, how, had money from Gladys' trust been used for the retirement contracts? They decided to withhold Sarah's share of Joseph's trust.
Meanwhile, Sarah's dementia worsened. She moved into an assisted-living apartment, where staff would provide her meals, help her take showers and do laundry, and make sure she took her medications.
Sarah gave power of attorney to her niece Angela, an accountant who lives with her husband in the Midwest. Angela asked Edwin, Jan and Donald to release her aunt's portion of Joseph's estate. They balked. Lawyers got into the act. After several months of increasingly tense missives, Angela decided to sue for Sarah's third of Joseph's trust, about $70,000.
Here's some news: The courts are clogged. Got a beef with someone, you sue. It's the American way. In Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, roughly 90,000 civil suits are filed each year.At the same time, the last decade or so has seen a dramatic rise in ways to settle legal battles outside the courtroom. The movement is called Alternative Dispute Resolution, and one of its most effective means is mediation. That's where legal foes and their attorneys enlist a neutral third party, a professional mediator, to help reach an accord.
Mediations can happen very early in the proceedings or way down the line, just before a judge or jury decides the case. In fact, Pinellas and Hillsborough courts require mediation before a final ruling in civil cases, but experts say it often happens too late, when sides are entrenched and a lot of money has already been spent. "Once people start into litigation it becomes harder and harder to settle because the feelings start to ossify," says St. Petersburg attorney Peter Wallace.
Even so, most civil cases settle out of court, and many of these agreements are achieved via mediation. This method of conflict resolution can offer myriad advantages to those who find themselves mired in lawsuits. Most notably, people can spare themselves the money, time and emotional turmoil of a protracted litigation. It's common for suits that would ordinarily draw out two or three years to be mediated successfully in a single day. As a byproduct, monetary awards get paid out more quickly because the parties mutually agreed rather than had a decision handed down by the court.
Mediation also helps ease court congestion. Pinellas Circuit Court Judge John Lenderman, who champions mediation, says he's currently booking civil trials four to five months out. If not for mediation, they would not see the courtroom for a year.
Edwin, Jan and Donald could've sued back. Their claim against Sarah would have been larger, close to a quarter-million dollars. After conferring with their Seminole lawyer, Paul Cavonis, they decided to give mediation a try. Cavonis floated the idea to Wallace, Angela and Sarah's attorney, who agreed that the case was ripe for it.They contacted Chuck Ross, a lawyer who gave up a partnership in the downtown St. Petersburg branch of the Holland & Knight law firm to hang out his shingle as an independent mediator.
The timing was ideal, because not enough volleys had been fired to open a yawning chasm between the parties. Both sides were highly motivated to settle and sophisticated enough to participate in a negotiation. The case was not burdened by an extensive need for legal discovery, the process of exchanging documents and other evidence. The suit was precisely the kind that should be mediated early — but too often is not.
They convened at 9:30 a.m. on a balmy Tuesday in late fall at Ross' office in northeast St. Petersburg:
Edwin flew in from New England. Jan and her son Donald, acting as an advisor, came from the Midwest. Cavonis represented the trio. Angela was accompanied by her husband Scottie. Wallace, their lawyer, showed up in slacks and a plaid shirt; otherwise it was a pretty buttoned-down group.
Ross greeted everyone with his usual effusive manner. The North Carolina native has a broad, open face and talks like Foghorn Leghorn's articulate cousin, peppering his speech with "y'alls" and homespun metaphors. His office, a converted old house on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street North, is designed for comfort and maximum human communication. You can't walk more than 10 feet without finding candy in a jar. Plush rugs decorate rich, hardwood floors. Comfy chairs hug expensive conference tables. Along with two cozy conference rooms, there are three smaller spaces for sidebar meetings and an outside deck for a change of pace. Ross had the place insulated for soundproofing and added a monster AC unit to keep everything cool and fresh.