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The Making of a Mediator
Different styles and different experiences allow three sought-after St. Louis mediators to bring more than skill to the table
By Stefanie Ellis
Rebecca Magruder's office is quiet now. All the chairs are placed neatly under the tables and the magazines in her waiting room are perfectly stacked. Just an hour before, however, things didn't seem nearly as peaceful. Not sixty minutes before a dull hush began to fall across the room there were amplified vocalizations of sadness and hurt bouncing off the walls, making everything seem hopelessly cluttered. Chairs were pushed out from the tables with more than usual force and the walls suddenly felt suffocating. There was a couple in the room - man and wife - and they were working overtime to ensure that their marriage would dissolve into thin air - almost as quickly as the angry words that escaped from their lips.
The scene is nothing new for Magruder, '96, an attorney with a Master's degree in Social Work who has been a mediator for nearly a decade. She sees all kinds of clients in her St. Charles office, where she conducts mediation services on a full-time basis. She handles a wide variety of cases, including business, landlord-tenant and real estate disputes, but spends a lot of time dealing with family issues. In this capacity she sees many divorce cases which vary in their level of intensity. Though, she says, the average divorce mediation is often resolved in about seven, two-hour sessions, Magruder has seen all ends of the spectrum. Some cases have been finished in as little as two hours, while others have lasted as long as three years.
Jerry Diekemper, '71, a partner at Diekemper, Hammond, Shinners, Turcotte & Larrew, P.C., and part-time mediator for the past 11 years, has definitely been party to the intensity that can accompany mediation but hasn't been involved in many drawn out cases like Magruder sometimes has. This is due in large part to the types of cases he handles. Despite having mediated over 700 cases that have run the gamut of legal issues, Diekemper doesn't handle family law cases. Instead, he deals largely with employment-related cases, including those dealing with non-compete clauses, employment discrimination and business disputes. He has also mediated cases dealing with personal injury issues, ERISA rights, and medical and legal malpractice.
Such is also the case for Gene Buckley, '52, a retired partner from Evans & Dixon LLC, who serves as a part-time mediator with United States Arbitration & Mediation Midwest, Inc. As a mediator, Buckley generally spends the better part of a day handling cases ranging from business disputes and medical malpractice to aviation law and automobile and premises liability. Similarly to Diekemper, he has rarely had to deal with what one might call lingering cases. The relative expediency of mediation is something Buckley tends to enjoy, particularly after spending the majority of his career practicing law.
"When you try a lawsuit, you have a lot of responsibility to your client," he says. "Sometimes, you wake in the middle of the night to think about it. Mediation is not like that. It can be stressful while it's going on, but you have everyone there in one day - clients, lawyers and a mediator - and each of those individuals is devoted to getting the case settled. That makes a big difference."
Diekemper is also aware of that difference, and although he sees mediations that typically run about three to four hours or, sometimes, ten to twelve hours over the course of a single day, he too is appreciative of the fact that most are completed in a short amount of time. He employs a caucus-style mediation in which all parties gather together to present their view of the dispute. Then the parties break into groups, where he speaks privately with each side. This approach allows him to acquire more details, but often results in a back-and-forth battle, depending upon the willingness of each side to reach an agreement.
"I do my Colin Powell impression all the time," Diekemper smiles, "and do the shuttle diplomacy routine in almost every case."
And while he admits an unwillingness to give up until the last gavel falls, Diekemper will call the mediation off if nothing more productive can come of the meeting. When this happens, he follows up with the parties in order to determine whether or not a future meeting would be beneficial.
Likewise, Gene Buckley, who has been mediating for eight years, has seen his share of relentless parties, where, as a result of their inability to reach a decision, he found that a great deal of "shuttling" was something of a necessity. An average amount of back-and-forth party parlaying for Buckley is six times, though he recalls cases where there were at least twenty different moves. Still, Buckley finds the temporary vacillation much easier to handle since he knows that he can rest easy at the day's end.
Diekemper, however, finds little time to rest since he has a legal practice to return to, following his frequent forays into mediation - his "other job." Juggling successful careers in both mediation and litigation, devoting about 60% of his time to the former and 40% to the latter, isn't the easiest of tasks, but somehow, Jerry Diekemper makes it look easy. It's probably because he's had some practice.
He conducted his first mediation in 1993 when McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) recruited him for his experience in dealing with union issues and age discrimination cases. After an impressive start mediating for McDonnell Douglas, he was asked to mediate more cases for other companies. The following year, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri offered a mediation training course and he became certified for that District. From that point forward, some of the country's largest and most notable companies have been requesting his services.
Rebecca Magruder's phone also rings quite a bit. After having established herself as one of the area's most trusted mediators, she gets referrals from the court system, family therapists, other attorneys and previous clients. The services she provides are balanced and fair, and are peppered with a great deal of compassion. For her, emotion is the foundation of any mediation since, she believes, it's the foundation of being human.
"What drives mediation is not the complexity of the issues, but the personality of the people who are dealing with them," says Magruder. "Emotional issues are just as important as every other detail and if you don't deal with them, you can't get anything else done. You're also much less likely to have durable agreements at the outset if you don't address the emotional issues that are raised."
With that in mind, Magruder takes a non-confrontational approach with her clients and tries to organize the process enough to help parties manage their own conflict. "I give an overlay of the structure in order to guide the conversation so that the parties know what the tasks are," she says, "but I don't direct them. I let them take the lead, though I try to keep them focused. Most importantly, however, I want them to feel safe. In order to accomplish this, I let them talk about the things that are important to them."
In addition to lending itself to a great deal of the cases she handles, Magruder's therapeutic style also falls in perfect alignment with her post-graduate training - something far from her initial career path. A former medical technologist who "hated every minute" of what she was doing, she traded in her Bachelor of Science degree for a Master of Arts degree. It wasn't until a friend suggested she consider mediation, however, that things began to make sense. She went back to school to earn a Master's degree in Social Work with an emphasis on family therapy and, three weeks later, started classes at Saint Louis University School of Law. She began practicing mediation in 1995, a year before she graduated with her J.D. from the School of Law.
Unlike Magruder and Diekemper, Gene Buckley was introduced to mediation toward the end of his career. In 1996, two years before he retired, someone from United States Arbitration and Mediation Midwest, Inc. contacted him and offered to provide him with mediation training. He agreed, and began conducting mediations on a part-time basis following his retirement in 1998. Almost effortlessly, Buckley shifted from being a partner at a law firm to a well-respected and sought-after mediator. Since 1999, Buckley estimates that he's mediated more than 500 cases, which is impressive, considering he's supposed to be enjoying his retirement. But, after speaking with him for just a short while, it's apparent that he is doing just that - enjoying his retirement by doing work he believes in.
And that's something each of St. Louis' best-known mediators share in common - they are doing work they believe in doing. Whether in an office across the river where the fate of families is decided or on the 5th floor of the Eagleton Federal Courthouse where major corporations are called upon to settle a dispute, any client is in good hands with these three. Along with a sense of compassion and a willingness to see things through, each of these mediators has impressive levels of experience and a strong reputation in the community. And, what's more, they all made changes in their lives in order to find room for mediation.
One took five years of advanced schooling to get where she is. Another has learned to juggle a demanding partnership at a law firm with his mediation practice. And another has amended his definition of retirement to include two to three mediations a week.
"I wouldn't want to do any more than that," Gene Buckley says with a grin. "Or any less."
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