Description:

Dinner & Dialogue with Randy Wulff and Yarko Sochynsky

“MEDIATION – A PERSONALITY ALTERING PROFESSION ”

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Randy Wulff and Yarko Sochynsky presented a lively and provocative program on the effects of mediation on the mediator’s personality over years of experience. Our speakers handed out a questionnaire with topics that drew significant audience participation and discussion, including whether experienced mediators are more or less patient, competitive, manipulative or controlling and in need of solitude than before. The need for stress reduction from being “on” for days at a time and how to pace a successful mediation practice, dreaming about negotiations and impasse, and handling the competitive tendency to treat a mediation without settlement as “failure” all drew questions and observations from the audience. As the evening ended, Dean Jay Folberg observed that this quality of discussion, with highly experienced and interested mediators sharing ideas and experiences in a warm and collegial environment, is quite rare in our professional experiece and is why The Mediation Society was founded.

Yarko Sochynsky has been a mediator and arbitrator since 1985, and became full-time in June, 2000 after twenty-seven years as a litigation partner with Landels, Ripley & Diamond. He works with Randy Wulff and Bill Quinby at their offices in Oakland, and also mediates and arbitrates in San Francisco through the American Arbitration Association. His practice includes business, construction, technology/IP, employment, health care and international disputes, both throughout California and throughout the United States. Yarko has mediated well over 500 disputes and has served as arbitrator in 50 or more cases. He is originator and co-author of California ADR Practice Guide, now published by Bancroft-Whitney, and recently led a professional delegation of neutrals, lawyers and judges to Beijing and Shanghai for the People to People Ambassadors programs.

Randy Wulff became a full-time mediator in 1994, after 20 years as a trial lawyer at Farella, Braun & Martel. His first exposure to mediation as an advocate was in 1983 and, in the ensuing years, he took his own clients through over 100 mediations. He began serving as a mediator, initially through AAA, in 1987. He has successfully settled well over 1000 cases covering a broad spectrum of complex commercial issues, including construction, intellectual property, securities, insurance coverage, real estate, environmental and employment matters. He now works with Yarko Sochynsky and Bill Quinby at their new space on Lake Merritt in Oakland. Randy is co-editor of two books on ADR, both marketed nationally. He has spoken on ADR at numerous national and international conferences and conventions, and was recently the keynote speaker to the Hawaii Bar Association.n
n