For those who don’t know me, I was involved in a personal lawsuit before becoming going to law school and becoming a lawyer. Initially,  I didn’t know much about mediation, other than it was a third party facilitated negotiation. I felt that court was the only way to go. But, after it was all over, I felt that court process was not completely satisfying, even though on paper, we “won”.  It was a very odd feeling. I remember my senior mentor who’s a lawyer had warned me, years before my trial, that no one comes out of litigation happy. I did’t get that and didn’t want to believe him. Surely if you win, you must feel “vindicated”? It must bring satisfaction, right?? But, in reality, that was not true for me. It made me wonder if I should have tried to learn more about mediation.

After a few years into practice, I finally met mediators Gregg Fenten and Laura Tarcea. I learned a lot more about mediation from our coffees together. Gregg and Laura convinced me that mediation is a much more civilized way to resolve disputes, not litigation. I would say to myself, after our coffees: “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could listen in to our conversation?” 

So, these videos are created in the spirit of sharing the amazing stuff that I learned. I hope you will enjoy watching and learning from these videos. Our main 3 sets of videos are listed below.

 Videos

Mediation

The first set is on family mediation. My guest speakers are Eva Di Giammarino and Laura Tarcea. Eva is a family lawyer, and both Eva and Laura are mediators. In these interview style videos, they explain what mediation is, from the basic concept, to what to expect in a mediation session. There are 3 of these, so far, with more coming in the future.

Civil Litigation

As for my favourite topic, civil litigation procedures, I asked civil litigator Dan Rosman to share his expertise with us. Here is a video on the basics in civil litigation:

I am also currently working with civil litigator Heather Douglas on videos that give practical tips for newcomers to the court process. We have a series called “Motion Procedures” to show the viewer how to prepare certain common court documents, such as a “Motion Record”. We even have a video on what Cerlox binding is! Procedural details like these trip up new lawyers and self-represented litigants alike. We hope that by having these videos available, much stress can be avoided for beginners to the court process.

Also check out our series Legalese Translator in which we translate technical terms commonly used in litigation into plain English.

Special Thanks

Creating these videos take team effort. I am deeply grateful to my speakers for all the time they committed to this project. All of them are doing in on a voluntary basis. In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues for reviewing the videos before release: my former classmates at UT’s LLM program, Sandrine Ampleman-Tremblay and Amanda Sierra, my colleagues at Self-Rep Navigators Mick Hassell, Monick Grenier and Jonathan Ng, and Abiramy Uthirakumaran, my former Pre-Law Mentoring student, who is now at Osgoode Hall Law School. Their feedback has hugely improved the quality of our content.

I hope you enjoy these videos. Please support this project by “liking” and subscribing! It’ll mean a LOT to us!