One year ago, I retired from my position as a federal magistrate judge and joined JAMS as a neutral. While change is always challenging, I anticipated a fairly straightforward transition. After all, during my 28 years on the bench of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, I presided over countless settlement conferences and a large number of bench trials and evidentiary hearings. How different could private mediations and arbitrations be, I thought, from the settlement conferences and bench trials and hearings with which I was so familiar?

While the similarities between settlement conferences and mediations, and between bench trials and arbitrations, far outnumber the differences, there are still significant distinctions. In this article, I will focus on one in particular: the prevalence of substantive pre-mediation-session conferences in private mediation.