CLE - Improving Judgment and Decision-Making to Improve Client Outcomes
November 21, 2014
2:00-5:30 p.m.
3.5 CLE credit
Room 105
Improving Judgment and Decision-Making to Improve Client Outcomes
Traditional legal education does not train lawyers in judgment and decision-making. Nonetheless, the expectation that attorneys are well-equipped to make decisions regarding settlements and transactions based upon the accurate predictions of outcomes is a large part of why clients hire them. How do you minimize decision error? Legal advice should only be for courses of action that allow decision error within the range of tolerable risk. Research has shown that most attorneys are actually poor predictors of actual outcomes. Recent advances in neuro-science have expanded knowledge of the workings of our brain and mind. This course introduces the lawyer to the latest understanding of how and why people make specific choices. Choices result from the interplay of a myriad of rational, emotional, biological, relational, cultural, motivational and other factors grounded in each of our own professional and personal identities, values, expectations, and experiences. This training course will help attorneys create patterns of behavior, or habits,that allow them to make appropriate decisions within their clients’ range of tolerable risk.
Presenter
David M. Doto, Director, Conflict Transformation Institute of Coral Bridge Partners, LLC
David M. Doto had a distinguished legal career spanning two decades as a civil litigator and business legal consultant representing clients ranging from individuals to Fortune 100 companies in the state and federal courts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada. David is a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, an exclusive invitation-only legal honorary society whose members have demonstrated superior litigation accomplishments and ethical standards, and is the co-founder of the LCA’s American Academy of Alternative Dispute Resolution.
David is currently the Director of the Conflict Transformation Institute of CoralBridge Partners, LLC. He also currently serves as a Judge Pro Temin Clark County, Nevada, and as an adjunct professor at the Saltman Center for Dispute Resolution in UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law, and at the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution in the Pepperdine University School of Law.
Drawing from his extensive legal experience, David is a skilled mediator able to employ facilitative, evaluative, and transformative techniques to litigated and non-litigated commercial, business, employment,and serious/catastrophic personal injury matters. He has been named as among the top 15 northeast region mediation firms in both 2012 and 2013 by the Philadelphia Business Journal. David has trained EEOC mediators in the Philadelphia and Los Angeles Districts of the EEOC, where he also serves as a mediator, and is also a member of the EEOC’s elite national Resolve Panel.
In addition to mediation, David is a certified provider of Hogan assessment and developmental coaching, conflict coaching, group meeting facilitation, private arbitration, neutral case evaluation, and Conflict Management Process Improvement design services. He also provides various training services tailored to client needs, including conflict management skills, managing high-conflict personalities, negotiation, basic and advanced mediation, decision-making skills, and mediation advocacy.
David is a graduate of Villanova University (Philosophy and Psychology), and from the Villanova University School of Law, and has earned numerous academic and subsequent professional accolades. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Law (L.L.M) in Dispute Resolution with a concentration in Mediation from the prestigious Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution of the Pepperdine University School of Law.
Selina J. Shultz, Co-Director of the Conflict Transformation Institute
Selina Shultz has over eighteen years of extensive mediation experience. She is sought out to work with individuals and businesses as a mediator and consultant in dispute resolution. In addition to her private mediation practice, she served for thirteen years as a mediator for the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas. Selina is currently on the approved mediator panels for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
Selina is a popular lecturer and trainer in the area of dispute resolution and has worked with individuals and businesses to provide both basic and advanced trainings in mediation and conflict resolution skills. As a principal with CoralBridge Partners, LLC, she provides conflict coaching and trainings to corporations and organizations which are struggling with conflict. Selina is an adjunct professor at Duquesne University School of law, where she co-teaches Judgment and Decision Making for lawyers with Robert A. Creo.
She has served as a leader in the field, most recently serving on the Executive Board of the Mediation Council of Western Pennsylvania and the Board of the Pennsylvania Council of Mediators. She has been asked to present at the Association for Conflict Resolution, the Academy of Professional Family Mediators National Conferences, and the Pennsylvania Family Law and Pennsylvania Council of Mediators State Conference. In addition, Selina helped to launch the Western District of Pennsylvania’s Federal Court Prisoners’ Civil Rights Mediation Pilot Program.
Selina graduated in 1990 from the University of Nebraska with a BA in Political Science and obtained her JD in 1993 from the University of Pittsburgh. Selina graduated in the spring of 2014 with an LLM in Dispute Resolution from The Straus Institute at The Pepperdine University School of Law, the top ranked program of its kind in the country.
Fee Schedule
Attorneys
$105
Boyd Alumni - Non-Boyd Alumni Association Member
$75
Boyd Alumni- Boyd Alumni Association Member
$30
Boyd Student/Faculty
Free
General Public/No CLE credit
$30