12. Identify the phrase use to characterize the extended time period courts take
to settle disputes
Answers
Answer:
There are few things managers dread more than litigation. Even petty cases have a way of damaging relationships, tarnishing reputations, and eating up enormous sums of money, time, and talent. Most managers know that lawsuits are steadily increasing. Smart managers know that they are also increasingly avoidable. There are now many alternatives to litigation that can nip lawsuits in the bud, resolve long-standing disputes, and even produce win-win solutions to old and bitter fights that would otherwise only leave both sides damaged.
U.S. corporations pay more than $20 billion a year to litigation attorneys—an alarming fact that distracts our attention from other and often more important business costs of litigating our disputes. Lawyers’ fees and other direct costs get the most attention because they’re easy to measure. But the indirect business costs of litigation, the cost of diverting key personnel from productive activities, for example, or the cost of destroying a profitable relationship with a former business ally, are perhaps equally important. From the company’s perspective, they may be more important.
The high cost of resolving disputes has several causes, but the most important is the mind-set established and nurtured by the adversary system. The essence of this system is that lawyers for opposing parties have the responsibility to present every piece of evidence and make every legal argument that might possibly benefit their clients. Pretrial discovery and other litigation procedures are designed to leave no stone unturned in the search for relevant evidence. By training, temperament, professional duty, and frequently by client expectation, attorneys tend to exploit these procedures to the fullest and to persevere as long as any hope remains. In fact, each lawyer has an obligation to be as zealous an advocate as possible, even—sometimes especially—to the detriment of discovering the truth and of resolving conflicts to the satisfaction of both parties.
The idea behind the adversary system is that the truth will emerge when opposing sides present their cases as aggressively as possible. Even though this ideal is not always realized, the principle is probably sound. The problem with the adversary method in civil cases is not theoretical but practical. First, it is not the most effective way to resolve some kinds of disputes. Second, it can be made more effective for most kinds of disputes by borrowing certain of the nonadversarial features of other forms of dispute resolution. Third, from both the societal and the individual perspective, we may no longer be able to afford it in its undiluted form.