What It Actually Means to Have Tried Cases on Both Sides

There is a question I am sometimes asked when lawyers are considering a mediator for a complex healthcare liability case: Does it matter that you handled cases on both the plaintiff and defense sides?

The honest answer is yes, and I want to explain why, because I think the reasons are more substantive than they might first appear.

It is not simply that having worked both sides creates a kind of biographical symmetry. It is that handling both plaintiff and defense work in the area of healthcare liability litigation are genuinely different disciplines, different in how cases are evaluated, different in what success looks like, different in the pressures that shape decision-making, and different in what each side needs from the mediation process.

Plaintiff work in catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases is deeply personal. The clients are families in crisis. The cases often involve children, devastating permanent injuries, or losses that cannot be fully quantified. Understanding what a plaintiff truly needs from resolution -- not just financially, but humanly -- requires having sat with those families and appreciated that a number on a piece of paper does not always capture what resolution actually means to them.

Defense work brings an entirely different set of realities. Reserve pressures. Institutional considerations. The dynamics of insured defendants who may have very different perspectives on the case than the carrier managing it. The weight of protecting a physician’s professional reputation alongside managing financial exposure.

Understanding how defense decisions are made, not in theory, but in practice, requires having navigated those pressures firsthand.

A mediator who has only seen one side of that equation brings half a picture to the table.

What 35 years on both sides provides is not just experience, it is fluency. The ability to understand, without explanation, what each party is carrying into the room, what they need in order to engage productively, and where the real obstacles to resolution are likely to be found.

That fluency is what genuine balance looks like in practice.

Contact me today to mediate your healthcare liability case at 407.493.0899 or book me directly on my Appointments page.