Nuts and Bolts
A neutral finds that a background running a tool-and-die business helps him quickly reach the bottom line.
by Tom Orewyler
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Most successful mediators can be separated into two categories: former judges, and lawyers with over 20 years of legal experience. Jeffrey P. Palmer never served on the bench and doesn't have quite the amount of litigation training that many of his counterparts can claim.
However, unlike most of his brethren, Palmer spent 14 years running a company before deciding to go back into law as a mediator. His business savvy isn't lost on lawyers who have used his services.
"He brought a comfortable personality [and] he cut to the quick faster than most mediators," said Allan Loewe, of Westlake Village's Peck and Loewe, who represented a defendant in an employment dispute before Palmer. Loewe added that one of the reasons Palmer has the ability to get to the bottom line more quickly than some is that he has a "strong business background."
Palmer, who devotes most of his alternative dispute resolution practice to mediation, is currently a panelist at ADR Services, Action Dispute Resolution Services and Judicate West, but receives most of his cases directly.
With over a dozen years of experience handling contract negotiations, real estate deals and employment matters as head of a manufacturing firm, Palmer believes his best attribute in mediation is his bottom-line experience in the business world.
"I don't think I ever tell someone, 'This case is worth X number of dollars,' " he said. Even so, in nearly all cases, Palmer will give both sides a dollar range in which the case is likely to settle.
While he believes in waiting to evaluate the merits of a case, Palmer says he will offer his opinion on ancillary matters, such as the credibility of witnesses, fairly early on.
In one mediation that involved a real estate deal that went sour, Palmer said one of the parties "looked like he was straight out of Central Casting in Hollywood for a Mafioso don." He made it clear to the party that his appearance might hurt him if the case reached trial. "I think it's an important thing to give my take on the way people look, whether they're believable and whether their stories make sense," Palmer said of the successful mediation.
Even when a mediation fails to yield a settlement, Palmer said, it's important to give the sides a "recap" of the day's events. "I tell them how much work has gone into it and what they're walking away from," he said. "And then I just kind of sit there." Sometimes, he added, such an outline will prompt renewed discussions between the parties after they realize how close they are to a deal.
Born in Pittsburgh, Palmer moved to Southern California with his family when he was a child, spending most of his early years in Pasadena. In the mid-1960's, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the crew team. Palmer was also a member of a fraternity as well as the ROTC, at a time when anti-war sentiments were running high, particularly at the UC campus.
"It was always a bit of a trick to get from where I lived, down to the football field, where we did our military practices in our uniforms," he recalled. As a member of the ROTC, Palmer was obligated to spend three years in the Army after his 1968 graduation. After receiving his infantry training at Fort Benning, Ga., Palmer went to Military Intelligence school in Baltimore, and in 1969, enrolled at the University of Maryland Law School as a night student. He was shipped off to Vietnam the following year.
After beginning his one-year stint in Southeast Asia, where he was a captain in military intelligence, Palmer injured himself playing touch football and was flown to Japan, where he spent the remainder of his military service.
He returned to the states and continued his legal education at Maryland, earning his J.D. in 1973. Upon graduation, Palmer and his wife moved to California, where he began studying for the bar exam. After receiving his license later that year, he became affiliated with a three-person firm in Pasadena that specialized in business, probate and divorce matters.
Palmer spent four years at that firm before moving to a two-attorney outpost in South Pasadena, where he worked for a year on a wide range of matters, with an emphasis on family law.
It wasn't long before he realized it was time for a change. "I got tired of doing divorce work [and] I was having trouble with giving advice to clients who didn't follow it, to their own detriment," he said.
In 1978, Palmer joined what he called the "family widget business," a tool-and-die company for the then-booming aerospace industry. The company was based in Monterey Park and was owned by his father. The company, Forge Die Co., made one-of-a-kind tools that were used to make aerospace parts. Among Palmer's responsibilities were performing all the legal work for the business, including negotiating outside contracts and agreements with union employees, creating pension and profit-sharing plans and handling real estate development matters.
Palmer stayed with the business, which reached 30 employees at its peak, for 14 years, and eventually became president and owner. Around the turn of the decade, however, the aerospace industry was facing tough times, and Palmer shut down the company in 1992 and liquidated its assets.
At the crossroads of his career, Palmer contemplated what to do next. "I kept my legal license alive, [but] I wasn't up to speed on practicing," he said. He discovered mediation when he began reading articles on the subject and was immediately hooked. "It came to me a bit like converting to a religion," he said.
After taking different training courses, Palmer joined The Mediation Center, a community-based, nonprofit dispute resolution program in Orange County that receives much of its funding from the government. Not long after that, Palmer joined the staff at the center, taught courses there and began conducting community and divorce mediations, both for free and for pay.
Around the same time, Palmer helped head the Westminster Municipal Court's mediation program, a one-year program where cases that were set for trial or a status conference were directed into mediation. According to Palmer, he settled 80 percent of these matters.
After the program shut down, Palmer returned to Pasadena to develop his private mediation practice, which has grown to include a handful of arbitrations, but usually only those of the nonbinding, court-ordered variety.
While Palmer has no second thoughts about his career move into mediation, he is a little disappointed that, even though ADR is as popular as ever, it has yet to catch fire in all legal circles. "It has surprised me how slow it's come to general acceptance, and I still don't think it's generally accepted," Palmer said. He added the reasons mediation has not fully caught on include the increased pressure lawyers have to litigate cases because of the reduced number of filings and court's fast-track programs over the last few years. "In 1992 [when he began mediating], I thought that overnight, suddenly it would be the answer. It hasn't taken off that steeply."
June 11, 1999 - Verdicts & Settlements
Copyright 1999 Daily Journal Corp. Reprented with Permission.
Supplement to The Los Angeles Daily Journal and San Francisco Daily Journal.
Photo by Robert Levins