The Expert Podcast

Mediation has become such a powerful tool that many governments are now implementing it in terms of social progress. Here's an example from the state of Oregon, where they have established a pilot program to mediate evictions for landlord-tenant cases. In this case, they put together a mediation board, which helps tenants and landlords resolve conflicts and issues when there's a problem with housing. The executive director of this program has a very good observation: "If people are creative and want to talk about it, there's lots of solutions that aren't textbook," and this is exactly what mediation does.

Many times, the parties in a case really can only see certain solutions. There might be a very obvious beneficial solution to both parties that is right before their eyes that they just don't know about or they can't see because they're only looking at it from one perspective. It's not that anybody's doing anything wrong; it's just that many times, parties come to it with one point of view.

It's not that you have to take the other person's point of view or give in to the other person. Many times, there's a solution that benefits both parties to a conflict equally. Sometimes, you end up better off than even if you won the case. This is a good perspective from one of the mediators: "The mediator can really think about what the solution is so everybody walks away feeling like they got what they needed out of the conversation." That's what a good mediation does—where everybody walks away feeling like they got something beneficial. Certainly, there may be some compromises or give and take, but usually, those give-and-take factors are much less than what it would have been if you had to go to court or fought it out in a more contentious manner.

One of the other factors for mediation being adopted is sometimes one or both of the parties are reluctant to do it. This article gets into that and talks about landlords being the most reluctant—not because they're opposed to it, but because they just feel like there might be something that's going against them. Forty-one percent of the time, negotiation ends with an agreed-upon move-out date, which benefits the landlord. Many times, landlords have been fighting for non-payment or something else for many months or even years, and mediation can help alleviate that and get a firm move-out day in agreement with the resident.

Remember, the mediator is a neutral third party—unbiased and impartial. That may be one of the hang-ups where some landlords think that mediation only benefits tenants. But the mediator is there to try to serve both parties and come up with a solution, not just a win for one of the two parties in the conflict. Such a resolution saves money for everybody. The landlord doesn't have to go to court, pay court fees, or wait several months to get in front of a judge. The tenant gets a firm resolution, maybe some breathing room so they're not evicted in two days, and the state saves money because they don't have court resources tied up for a conflict that can be resolved with a dispute resolution process outside of the court system.