Earlier this month, New Haven’s Community Mediation, Inc. presented its annual Honorable Robert C. Zampano Awards for Excellence in Mediation. This year, the winners were federal Magistrate Judge Holly B. Fitzsimmons and attorney Richard A. Bieder. Both of this year’s winners had direct experience with the late Judge Zampano, an early advocate of mediation. In a June 12, 2010 New Haven Register article by Randal Beach, Bieder called Zampano ” ‘one of my heroes’ ” and Fitzsimmons said that “‘ ‘he found a way to be a force for healing.’ ”
As Fitzsimmons so aptly described it, mediation is a way of “achieving ‘outside-the-box solutions not seen in adversarial court situations.” And Bieder summed up Zampano’s influence well: he ” ‘got us trench lawyers to see the benefit of this new technique of mediation.’ “
