Former Chief Justice to join ADR firm, will be available for mediations and appellate consultations [Updated]

Tani Cantil-Sakauye, who retired as California’s Chief Justice at the beginning of the year and became president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California, has agreed to join ADR Services, Inc. She will start there April 24 while also remaining as the head of PPIC.

At ADR, Cantil-Sakauye will do mediations, but not arbitrations. She will also “be available to handle appellate consultations, including case evaluations and moot courts,” Theresa Nguyen, ADR’s business manager, said in an email.

In a phone interview, Cantil-Sakauye said she learned from retired Justice Ming Chin, her former court colleague who is currently an ADR Services neutral, that the consultations can include not just moot courting a case, but, earlier in the process, while briefing is being developed, consulting “on the nature of the case and the strength of the arguments that are being made at the appellate level” to evaluate “what might be more successful to emphasize.”

Before leaving the bench, the former Chief Justice expressed reservations about private alternative dispute resolution systems. At her final meeting with the press, she said cases are going to mediation or arbitration, or are not being filed at all, because of a “justice gap,” which she characterized as “firmly rooted in social inequity, in racial, gender, [and] economic classifications and proxies.” Diverting cases to private resolution services impedes the “[development of] the rule of law,” Cantil-Sakauye said then, and she wondered whether the courts in the future will see mostly cases where the litigants can’t afford alternative forums.

While she was chief justice, Cantil-Sakauye started a program to make retired judges available to serve as mediators in civil cases at no cost to litigants.

In the interview today, Cantil-Sakauye said that she continues to have “reservations about the oversights, or potentially lack thereof, of mediation services” and that she still believes “there ought to be robust oversight through the State Bar of mediation services for the public because it must be futile and exasperating for people who are seeking mediation and have no recourse and have serious complaints.”

Despite leading PPIC, Cantil-Sakauye assured she still has “a lot of energy” and “the time” to be involved with matters through ADR. She thinks it will be a good fit because, even though she is no longer a judge, she “gravitate[s] towards reading the cases and finding out what’s happening and following up on certain issues out of curiosity as to how they’re developing.”

Related:

Cheryl Miller in The Recorder.

David Houston in the Daily Journal.

The end of the Cantil-Sakauye court

[March 28 update: Kevin Rector in the Los Angeles Times — “Former California chief justice joins private mediation firm after criticizing industry“]