Fairly Legal set visit: Michael Sardo interview (part 5)

Check out our set visit in part 1, our Virginia Williams interview in part 2,
our Michael Trucco interview in part 3, and our advanced review in part 4)

Well, you make a very good case. A friend from college has used mediation for various things, so I’m intrigued that you’re using the mediator since it’s something new for the legal area.
I think that, you know, it sort of takes away a lot of the artifice of legal shows. And the thing that you want to get to is that scene in the fourth act where you — the people get to confront each other, the explosive truth comes out. We start with that.

I was going to bring it back to mediation. Maybe I’m just a little obsessed with it. When I think about mediation I always think of it as something dealing with smaller cases.
Mm hmm.

Such as either mediating divorce, or cases such as a family versus a school. It seems as if Kate deals with larger types of mediation issues, which I haven’t seen. Do you think it possibly takes away from the initial focus because she wants to help people, but she’s still at a high-powered law firm? Will we eventually see her possibly leaving that firm, and perhaps working on those smaller kinds of family cases (although she still finds a way to do it at the high-powered law firm)?
Well I think she’s drawn to the humanity at the center of the case. I was talking to a mediator in New York who was dealing with an issue. Now, New York, for instance, New York State, has 64 mediation centers, one in each county. And they’re free; anyone can walk in and get things. Or Florida, you have … you cannot get a divorce in court until you’ve been through mediation. You know, so the courts are recognizing it a lot more. And now in a lot of states for the first time you can do family issues.

But mediators are also called in routinely by the UN to mediate disagreements between countries. But essentially, between countries what you have is you have two people sitting there. They might be Heads of State, but they have a lot of history. And they might have gone to prep school together in Switzerland. And so if you can ferret that out, you can get maybe to a solution.

But this — the case I was going to tell you about, a woman was … filed a suit of sexual harassment. She was a receptionist. It was against the CEO of a company. The CEO found out that she was an illegal immigrant so tried to get her deported. So she went to a human rights lawyer. So by the time a mediator got involved, there were twenty-two parties involved in this room when she walked in. The Humans Rights Commission was involved. You know, it had become this enormous thing.

So it became sorting through all of that to get to the fundamental issue, which was, “What was your workplace environment like?” So even when you have a big issue, there’s usually a small thing at the center of it. And Kate in each of these cases — as you go through our first — we like to think of a line that encapsulates … a question that we’re dealing with, or grappling. So what is a life worth? How do you put a value on it? Who is a hero?

We have a case — episode 1.06 is a woman comes in and it’s a case of identity theft, except she’s involved in a way that’s unusual. She was brought here from Honduras at the age of two, doesn’t speak Spanish, raised to be the All-American girl. Her parents discouraged her from speaking another language. They didn’t find out until high school there was no path to citizenship for her unless she went back to Honduras. She doesn’t know anyone there. She doesn’t have any relatives there. She doesn’t speak Spanish.

So she bought a stolen — a social security number of a woman who was dead and enlisted in the army, served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and came back. And as soon as she applied for a credit card found out the woman’s alive. And then because of that, when she meets the woman the woman reports her to immigration. And now it’s an immigration issue. So she can deal with bigger issues, but always in a Kate way. And for that she enlists the help of Lauren, because she can’t go to court.

But at the center of all of these, we try to make sure the issues are always about the people, and not about the points of law. And that’s the difference. Because in a law show, a traditional law show, you’re dealing with how do I get the best results for my clients given the strictures of the law? And here, there are no rules. A friend of mine who uses — he’s a real estate lawyer. And we walk our dogs together, and we’re talking about mediators. And he was on a case for, I think it was four years, of these two landlords suing each other.

So he said, “I’m going to bring in this mediator. This guy teaches at Stanford. $10,000 a day he gets.” It’s not a low paying job necessarily. And the guy came in and said, “All right, you two; it’s been four years. Here’s the deal. It’s 8:00 am. You go to the bathroom, we all go to the bathroom. You go to get something to eat, we all get something to eat. And no one leaves except to go to the bathroom. And when we do that we’re all going together.” And they started at 8:00 am, and at 3:00 am the next morning they solved the case. They were tired, they didn’t smell so good, but they solved the case. So I think it’s about pushing off everything else and just putting those people together.

For the questions asked by other writers regarding Michael Trucco clack on.

Clacked by An Nicholson
on Feb 16, 2011 @ 16:00 EST5EDT