From the desk of Norman Solovay

At a time when many of my Columbia Law School classmates and other friends are retiring or talking about doing so, I am pleased to be embarking upon an exciting new chapter in my legal career. As a successful "jack of all trades" litigator, I have tried cases ranging from antitrust, securities and estate litigations through personal and business divorces, entertainment industry lawsuits and many, many others. I have now however joined McLaughlin & Stern, one of New York's longest established firms (founded in 1898) as the partner in charge of its Alternative Dispute Resolution practice where I am pursuing my long held interest in settling rather than litigating disputes.

This turnabout includes a mutual understanding with my firm to explore peaceful resolutions to disputes. The most recent statistics indicate that only a small fraction of lawsuits filed are actually tried. But they don't indicate the huge costs—in money, emotional stress, damaged relationships and polarized positions—more often than not incurred before the typical litigation settlement, frequently on the court-house steps, is finally arrived at. In the long run, we look forward to the day when, despite its successful and well–regarded litigation practice, my firm will have become best known and most attractive to clients for its efforts to keep them—or get them—out of court.

I invite you to browse through this special website dealing with McLaughlin & Stern's full service dispute resolution practice in order to learn more about the range of methods and techniques now available to accomplish this mission early on in any dispute. You are no doubt familiar with the more established and traditional ones. But there are often good reasons why they won't work. As a result, other settlement techniques have been developing and/or are regaining popularity and are also being increasingly utilized to match the growing recognition of clients that subjecting themselves to the dangers and uncertainties of court proceedings should be a very very last resort.

In combination, the success rate of these traditional and newly popular settlement techniques is amazingly high. An important part of my new work involves matching the client and the dispute with the most appropriate dispute resolution technique. One size doesn't begin to fit all. Mediation, which has a very high settlement rate, is an obvious choice and we will recommend and implement it in many situations. However there are cases for which it is not suitable. For these we make available other solutions including collaborative law and various cooperative law offshoots and/or the return to older techniques that for various reasons had fallen out of favor, such as the use of settlement counsel and med-arb—a combination of mediation and arbitration that has been referred to by recent proponents as "the best of both worlds."

At McLaughlin & Stern we are now dedicated to assisting you in avoiding the expense and strain and dangers of courtroom proceedings whenever feasible. Moreover, we believe it isn't necessary to wait until a dispute is upon you to plan for its resolution. For example, pre-nuptial agreements are no longer exclusively the province of the super-rich but are being utilized more and more by ordinary couples who, in recognizing that almost 50% of marriages now end in divorce, want to plan in advance for an amicable one if worst comes to worst. So in addition to handling divorces in the most amicable way possible, we factor that desire into the pre-nuptial agreements we draft for clients. Moreover, we are similarly available in regard to all other kinds of matters as to which our clients consult us—including commercial, entertainment, estate, real estate and international transactions—to explore with you the types of disputes likely to arise and to select with you for inclusion in whatever agreements are at issue the dispute resolution clauses best suited for dealing with disputes if you do have them later.

So whether you are an individual seeking to divorce amicably, settle a business dispute, plan for resolving a domestic or international dispute, or a lawyer who would like our assistance as settlement counsel or in other ways to resolve a client's troublesome dispute, Please feel free to contact me at (646) 278-4295 or email me by clicking here with any questions you may have about our services.

Sincerely,

Norman Solovay