Ed Ahrens, Jr., Esq. writes monthly thought provoking Editorials on mediation. These views are Ed's and do not necessarily reflect those of Florida Mediation Group.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic,
a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge
of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832
Guy Mannering, Ch. 37

I confess, my first love (aside from my wife, sons, grandchildren and our Boston Terrier) is mediation. My second love is freelance writing, especially fiction. The order of preference between the two may change depending on the company I'm in at the moment.

Now, before you think there is a great chasm between creative writing and the practice of law, including mediation, I can assure you they have more in common than you might believe. Why do you think so many lawyers, like John Grisham, are hitting the literary trail? And, no, however much I would like to be, I am no John Grisham.

After all, aren't lawyers adept at writing fiction? Okay, in fairness, let's call it creative non-fiction. Certainly, creativity blossoms as counsel sets forth his or her one-sided arguments calculated to persuade courts and juries of the rightness of the client's cause and the wrongness of that of the opponent.

Whether attorney or freelance writer, the objective is to persuade, to influence, to bring the audience to your way of thinking. In literature, this is true of both fiction and nonfiction. Indeed, fiction is sometimes the most effective means of persuasion. Do you think Charles Dickens was simply writing nice stories? Not on your life. Dickens was, after all, at various times in his early life, a solicitor's clerk and a reporter in both the law courts and parliament. There was always a moral or point in his stories, and lawyers and the legal system often caught the unkind brunt of his imaginative genius.

And how does all this relate to mediation? Well, like judges and juries, mediators are prime witnesses to the circumlocutions and verbal perambulations of counsel whose ethical responsibility, we recognize, is to serve as a resolute advocate for the client's case. The mediator's role is to recognize those efforts for what they are and for what they intend to accomplish, to separate the legalistic chaff from the substantive wheat.

So, mediator, relax and enjoy the creativity of counsel on both sides of your mediation, and remember always that what you are hearing, more than likely, is some finely tuned and often entertaining creative nonfiction. It is after all the way our system of justice operates, and, somehow, it works-most of the time anyway.

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