Introduction

• Jurisdiction: United States

Introduction

Rudyard Kipling, one of the British empire's most popular writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once wrote a poem called "If." In relevant part, it proclaims,

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap of fools . . .

You may already know that part of this passage appears just above the Wimbledon players' locker room exit gate, their last sight before entering the portal that leads them to potential glory or shame on its hallowed grass courts.

Kipling is not around to prevent me from borrowing his inspiring words and applying them to another hotly contested arena—the conference rooms across the world where mediations are daily conducted. In fact, while taking my liberties with Mr. Kipling, I would supplement his poetry with a few additional lines:

If herein you seek an academic dissertation
To best represent a client at mediation
While ignoring decades of practical experience
On what will work and what will not—
Then save your time, dear friend, and cease reading now:
For this book is not for you.

Over a century ago, another immortal of British literature, one Charles Dickens, noted in Bleak House that "No two lawyers can talk for five...