On May 16, 2008, the Connecticut Bar Foundation presented the Sixth John A. Speziale ADR Symposium at the Quinnipiac University School of Law. The keynote speaker, Kenneth Feinberg, spoke about his experience as the Special Master of the Federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001. Although the process he developed and administered for the Fund was not strictly mediation or arbitration, he shared interesting insights into why the Fund worked so well.
One observation was very familiar to mediators: the right to be heard was vitally important to those who had had lost a loved one or suffered injury. Mr. Feinberg stressed that participants could bring anyone they wished, and as many as they wished, to their hearing. They spoke poignantly of their loss and their pain, and how their lives had been changed by that day’s events.
The need to be heard, and to have a loss acknowledged, can be essential in mediations of any type: from the business dispute that seems on the surface to be only about dollars and sense to the family ruptured by disagreement over how to make decisions about an elderly relative’s care.
