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Thursday, November 27, 1997

Supply of mediators far outpaces demand

HOUSTON (AP) -- The good news: Tens of thousands of Texans are trained pretrial mediators who are supposed to help litigants settle out of court. The bad news: Nobody wants them to mediate.

Lax state regulation of mediators and the programs that train them is being blamed on the resulting glut of mediators, the Texas Journal of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

"You have to go through more testing to paint fingernails or cut hair," said Suzanne Duvall of Dallas, former chairwoman of the State Bar of Texas section on alternative dispute resolution.

Consequently, lawyers and judges are turning only to mediation by lawyers, the newspaper said.

The result has been a surplus of mediator-school graduates who simply have nothing to mediate.

Wendy Trachte-Huber, director of the A.A. White Dispute Resolution Institute at the University of Houston, estimated that as many as 30,000 Texans have completed the course work necessary to qualify as court-appointed mediators in the past 10 years. About 10,000 perform mediation work each year, she said.

"It seems almost everyone in Dallas County is trained as a mediator now," said Claudia Dixon, administrative manager for the Dallas Dispute Resolution Center.

The center is one of 13 nonprofit organizations in Texas funded by court filing fees to train volunteer mediators and offer free dispute resolution services to litigants in cases where less than $50,000 is at stake.

Of the 1,000 volunteer mediators registered at the center, only about 350 have mediated more than one case, Ms. Dixon said.

The Legislature legalized pretrial mediation in 1987 to help judges clear their dockets of time-consuming and expensive litigation proceedings. In Travis County, courts last year mandated that all civil cases go to mediation before they can proceed to trial.

Texas, however, has no minimum age or educational prerequisite to enroll in mediation training. There's no licensing test or continuing-education requirement.

And while state law requires mediators to complete 40 hours of training before they can accept court appointments, there are no regulations governing what the courses must cover or who should teach them.

Also, there are no binding ethics rules, no agency or trade group monitoring the system and no grievance process.

Some members of an advisory committee to the Texas Supreme Court are calling for stricter training and certification standards for mediators, as other states have done.

"The atmosphere is ripe for things to go wrong when you don't have any standards, and you have no control over the training or qualifications," said Bud Silverberg, a lawyer and member of the advisory committee.