JimGroton.com

Lawyers as Peacemakers

"Discourage litigation, persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.  Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser -- in fees, expenses and waste of time.  As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man.  There will still be business enough."  - Abraham Lincoln, 1840
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Dispute Resolution Board & Standing Neutral Experience PDF Print E-mail

Jim has served as a DRB member or single standing neutral on a number of railway, power plant, highway and hotel projects throughout the United States.  He has long been a practitioner, participant and advocate of the use of DRBs and other forms of Standing Neutral on construction projects and in other business relationships.

He has done much writing and speaking on the workings of DRBs and Standing Neutrals, including:

Chapter on "Jobsite Dispute Resolution" in Preventing and Resolving Construction Disputes, CPR, 1991

"The Role of Jobsite Dispute Resolution in Improving the Chances for Success on a Construction Project," 13 Construction Lawyer 21, 1992 (with co-author William R. Wildman)

Major contributor to a landmark research study of the use of dispute review boards on commercial projects conducted by the Construction Industry Institute:  Dispute Prevention and Resolution: Alternative Dispute Resolution in Construction with Emphasis on Dispute Review Boards, CII Source Document 95, 1993 (Principal author, Professor Michael C. Vorster)

"Dispute Review Boards:  Backdoor Partnering," presented at the Construction Leadership Conference, 1993, and reprinted at 75 Contractor Magazine 22, 1993

Contributor to Construction Dispute Review Board Manual, McGraw-Hill, 1996

"Jobsite Dispute Control Methods and the Continental Divide of Dispute Resolution," International Construction Law and Dispute Resolution Conference, Salzburg, Austria, Center for International Legal Studies, 1998

"Stop Construction Industry Disputes Before They Arise:  Jobsite Dispute Control Methods," CONEXPO Conference, 1999

"Dispute Review Boards Here and Overseas," ABA Section of Dispute Resolution, 2001

"Real Time Dispute Resolution Devices," Global Construction Superconference, London,2001

"A Comparison of Dispute Review Boards and Adjudication," 18 International Construction Law Review 275, 2002 (with co-authors Robert A. Rubin and Bettina Quintas) 

Speaker on the subject of "Project Neutrals" a the ABA Forum on the Construction Industry Program on the New Consensus.DOCs, 2008

A notable current assignment:

One of Jim's particularly innovative current assignments is serving in the role of the "Development Arbitrator" on a hotel development project still under construction, which is a part of a mixed-use real estate development with a construction cost of over $2 billion.  The process that was designed for that project is a variation of the Standing Neutral/DRB process which includes an initial fast-track mediation followed if necessary by immediate binding arbitration using a "baseball arbitration" technique, guaranteeing that no dispute will go unresolved for more than 30 days.  The process has been so successful that after more than 22 months of a scheduled 30-month project duration the parties have resolved every potential dispute by themselves and have not found it necessary to refer a single dispute to the Development Arbitrator.