Thirty years ago, the federal court assigned a case of mine to a settlement conference before one of the icons of the Northern District bench. A champion of individual rights, this fine judge was then in his late ’70s and had long ago assumed senior status. At that stage of his distinguished career he was regularly conducting settlement conferences in federal civil cases, and had a reputation for remarkable success. I looked forward to experiencing a master at work.
As it turned out, the judge’s dispute resolution technique was nothing more, or so it seemed, than first eliciting proposed figures from each side, pronouncing a settlement figure that was midway between the parties’ figures, and then spending the rest of the conference hammering away at the lawyers until they both agreed to his number. So famous was this approach that the judge’s name came to be used as a verb; we would return from one of his settlement conferences muttering about how the case had settled but we had been “forced into submission.”
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