Transcript

I'm John Scherling, and I'm a mediator at JAMS. Uh, after law school, I clerked for one of our federal district judges here in San Diego. After that, I was in private practice and also worked for the United States Attorney's Office, where I prosecuted criminal cases and defended the United States in civil litigation. The last 10 years before I was appointed to the Superior Court, I focused exclusively on intellectual property litigation throughout the United States. I was appointed to the Superior Court in 2016. I had a number of assignments, including four years in family, four years in probate, and the last two years before I retired in 2025, I was the lead probate judge in San Diego. Litigation i- is often an all or nothing proposition for the parties. Somebody's gonna win, somebody's gonna lose. Mediation affords the opportunities for the parties to design a solution that, the court can't do. In my experience, the most important thing for attorneys in preparing their clients for mediation is for the lawyers to be agents of reality. Clients do not like hearing about weaknesses in their case for the first time from the mediator. If the lawyers have worked with them and talked to them realistically about the strengths and weaknesses of their case, the clients are more likely to have trust in the lawyers, and then also more likely trust in me. My core practice areas, I would say, are probate, family, and intellectual property. In addition to those, I've been fortunate to handle a, a wide variety of types of cases in my career, ranging from medical malpractice to products liability to excessive force cases, and I welcome the opportunity to apply my experience to help people resolve virtually any kind of dispute. Probably the most difficult part of dealing with an mediation can be dealing with the party's emotional aspects that they bring to a mediation. Just yesterday, I had a case in which the party had a tremendous sense of feeling injustice and betrayal. I found that a number of approaches can be helpful in addressing these emotional challenges. Probably most fundamentally is listening to the parties and really listening a- and finding out what's driving these emotions, but also just working with them to help them focus on. looking forward rather than looking back, not only financially, but on the peace of mind they can get out of settling. My reward in helping parties work through their disputes is knowing that I've helped them with some of the most difficult times in their lives and getting through those challenges, and I would say there's nothing more satisfying than at the end of a mediation hearing the parties say, "We couldn't have done it without you."