Individuals and businesses often turn to the courts to resolve disputes that arise with vendors, customers, employees, and competitors. In working with your attorney, one of your first tasks will be to determine whether it would be better to litigate the dispute or seek other another method of dispute resolution (ADR) and if the decision is to litigate, whether a bench trial or jury trial would be more appropriate.
After identifying some of the factors that enter into these decisions, the Dispute Resolution module explores the stages of civil litigation process. After the plaintiff initiates the lawsuit by filing a complaint, other pleadings and pre-trial motions define the factual and legal issues that would need to be resolved at trial, while the discovery process allows the parties to obtain information to build their cases through depositions, interrogatories, motions to produce documents, and physical or mental exams, where the physical or mental capacity of a party is an issue. If the parties still haven’t settled the dispute and the plaintiff has requested a jury trial, the next stage will be the selection of a jury, followed by trial and appeal. Court documents and trials are public and the resolution of a dispute through trial and appeal can be very expensive and take years to before a final resolution is reached.
To avoid these disadvantages, many companies prefer to resolve disputes through one of the methods of alternative dispute resolution — negotiation, mediation, arbitration, a hybrid forms of ADR. These methods also provide the parties with more control over the process and outcome, which can remain private if the parties so agree. To achieve these benefits and to keep disputes out of the courts, many businesses insert arbitration clauses into consumer and employment contracts as a way to prevent the litigation of disputes, should they later arise. In this module, you will study the features, advantages, and disadvantages of these primary alternatives to litigation, with an emphasis on their use in business.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
- What factors should a plaintiff consider in deciding whether to litigate a case in court or to use an alternative method to resolve the dispute?
- In a civil lawsuit
- What are the pleadings?
- What is discovery?
- How is the jury selected?
- How does a case proceed through trial?
- When can a case be appealed?
- What are the primary alternatives to litigation and why are they so popular with business?
This module also provides a number of enrichment readings and videos for you to go deeper into topics that particularly interest you. For example, you’ll find some actual legal documents: sample mediation and arbitration clauses, as well as two brief court opinions dismissing cases for failing to obtain personal jurisdiction over the defendant (Satan in one and God in the second). The module also has a number of video excerpts of actual depositions, including one of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams in the Blurred Lines copyright case and two verbatim re-enactments of very bizarre depositions that are included for your entertainment, not as an example of a good deposition!
If you’re interested in jury trials, you’ll find jury orientation videos produced by courts and sample questions that may be asked during voir dire (jury selection), as well as some that should not be asked. There is also a 48-minute video of the 1993 wrongful death trial, Moseley v General Motors, brought by parents of a Georgia teenager who burned to death in his GM truck after it was hit by another pick-up and burst into flames. The jury in that case returned a $105 million dollar verdict ($101 in punitive damages) — at that time, the largest verdict in Georgia history!