In an article written by Kate Vitasek, a business school professor, business consultant, and prolific author, Forbes Magazine has reported on how successful Standing Neutrals can be in preserving supplier relationships, especially during pandemic stresses.
The Forbes article and podcast linked below explain in detail how Standing Neutrals work, and also Jim Groton’s pioneering work with that most successful of all dispute prevention devices.
Excerpt: “The Father of the Modern Standing Neutral Concept”
Waxman considers Jim Groton “the father of the modern Standing Neutral concept.” Groton, a retired partner of the global law firm Eversheds Sutherland, received CPR’s inaugural Outstanding Leadership in Dispute Prevention award earlier this month.
Groton – an expert in preventing disputes in the construction industry – has long advocated for conflict prevention. Jim began his career as a practicing lawyer during Atlanta’s building boom in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Over the years, Groton evolved his career from being a trial lawyer, to a troubleshooter, to a behind-the scenes counselor, to problem solver, and ultimately to pioneering in the application of proactive techniques for preventing, controlling, de-escalating, and achieving the earliest possible resolution of disputes.
In a recent interview, Groton noted how he evolved his thinking from dispute resolution to dispute prevention. “The construction industry has historically had a reputation of being very litigious, and it’s common for construction projects to experience multiple disputes. As a construction lawyer, I have represented hundreds of clients in disputes. Long ago I became an early adopter of mediation and arbitration because they offered faster and less expensive ways to resolve disputes. But over the years, I realized that traditional mediation and arbitration are too slow for fast-moving modern business activities.”
Groton then learned that some very smart geotechnical engineers had invented ‘Dispute Review Boards’ for dealing with difficult construction project engineering issues. A Dispute Review Board is a panel of three experts who meet regularly with the parties involved in a construction project with a goal to help the parties resolve issues promptly. In 1991 Groton noted that the success of Dispute Review Boards proved that by providing a neutral perspective very early in the process you can prevent disputes, and suggested that the concept could be applied to any type of business relationship. He then adapted it by piloting the idea of using one single neutral with success.
Groton adds, “The Standing Neutral technique has turned out to be by far the best existing preventive approach I have seen. Embedding a neutral as part of contracting parties’ governance process emphasizes facilitating issue resolution while misalignments are small – well before there is a dispute. I came to find that embedding a Standing Neutral has almost ‘magic powers’ to keep disputes from happening.”
In case the reader has difficulty accessing the original Forbes article, here is a PDF of the article.