When one of my businesses has a legal question, I hire a lawyer. I don't hesitate, I don't shop around, and I don't second-guess the answer. Lawyers spend their careers mastering the law, and when I need the law, I want the best-trained legal mind in the room.
But when I have a dispute with another business owner over a contract gone sideways, a sour partnership, or a deal that fell apart, I don't want it litigated. I want it resolved. And I want someone across the table who has actually sat where I sit: someone who understands what a relationship is worth, who has worked through good deals and bad ones, and who can see what the two people in the room are really fighting about, because it is rarely just what is written in the complaint.
That distinction, between mastering the law and mastering the problem, is at the heart of what I want to say to the growing number of us who came to this profession from somewhere other than law school. We are specialized mediators. In our own domain, we can do the job better, because just as lawyers are masters of the law, each of us is a master of something. Mine is business. Yours might be insurance, or medicine, or any of the countless fields where disputes arise.
How I Got Here
I own real estate and lending businesses. I've built companies that succeeded and companies that failed, and I've helped a lot of other people build theirs. I didn't set out to become a mediator. I came to it the way a lot of the best things happen: sideways, and mostly by accident.
A few years ago, interest rates spiked violently. The rate on the kind of loans I write went from 2⅞ percent to over 7% in less than a month. For many people I knew, some I had personally written loans with, that was catastrophic. Monthly payments jumped overnight, property values dropped below the debt sitting against them, and I found myself spending a considerable part of my time helping people find a way out: a workaround, a sale, a conversation with a lender, anything short of foreclosure. One night I was playing poker and made an offhand comment that I wished I could get paid for solving people's problems, because solving problems seemed to be all I was doing.
That's when a friend told me about mediation. He introduced me to Jeff Zaino, Vice President of the Commercial Division at the American Arbitration Association (AAA), who placed me on the AAA panel of mediators. Since then, I've attended many AAA functions and was even a speaker for an AAA panel discussion on reading body language, a skill that, incidentally, no bar exam tests and every mediator needs. I'm also on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) panel, and I've connected with organizations like Empower Assist Care (EAC) and the Long Island Dispute Resolution Center (LIDRC) that allow me to mediate in local courthouses.
Those courthouse cases are small claims: ordinary people, everyday problems, with a settlement ceiling of $5,000. I like those cases, and I'm grateful for them. But I want to help people solve business problems. Sit me down at a table with business owners, customers, distributors, anyone at all with a business dispute, and let me use a lifetime of experience to help them dig down to the root of it.
The Door That Would Not Open
Here's the challenge that keeps getting put in front of me: I try to get a mediation assignment, and I'm told I have no experience. But the only way to get experience is to get an assignment. It's circular. So, I figured I'd start working my way up the New York court system. With the training and support of EAC and LIDRC, I began mediating cases at the District Court level. After more than 100 cases, I felt I had enough experience to move up to the next rung: Civil Court.
I applied to the 1st, 10th, and 11th District Courts of New York. At first, I was told I needed additional training, so I took an advanced mediation course, a commercial mediation course, and an advanced commercial mediation course. After completing more than the required amount of training, I reapplied, only to be turned down at all three courthouses because I'm not a lawyer.
Now, mildly annoyed, I did what any curious person would do: I went looking for the rule. I searched for the statute, the regulation, the written policy, anything that said a mediator at that level must hold a law license. I couldn't find one.
I heard similar versions of the same answer elsewhere. When I inquired at two of the largest mediation organizations in the country, I was told that only judges and attorneys mediate there; those are the rules. These are private organizations, and they're entitled to set the rules for their own businesses; I have no problem with that. My only question is why more of them don't try something different. The pattern is the same one I keep running into across the field: a closed glass door with no visible lock, and behind it an untouched field of opportunity going to waste because no one is paying attention.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a grievance, and it is certainly not an attack on lawyers. I have enormous respect for the legal profession and the legal system; I depend on both. My point is narrower, and I think more useful. When I ask whether it might make more sense for a business owner (someone who has built businesses, lost businesses, and guided others through both) to mediate a business-to-business dispute, rather than a lawyer who has spent a career studying the law, I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm asking a real question. And I think the answer, honestly considered, is that it very often does make sense. A mediator working in the field they know best should be better equipped for the task. That leads to better outcomes and, ultimately, better service for the people in the room.
Match the Mediator to the Problem
Consider how we choose experts everywhere else in life. If two hospitals were in a dispute over a clinical protocol, wouldn't you want a mediator who understands medicine, a physician, or a hospital administrator, helping them find common ground? If two software companies were fighting over a failed integration, wouldn't an engineer's intuition be worth something in that room? In almost every field, we instinctively match the expert to the domain. Yet in mediation we have quietly defaulted to a single credential — the law degree. The overwhelming majority of mediators are lawyers or former judges, as though every dispute was fundamentally a legal one.
Most business disputes are not legal problems. They are business problems wearing legal costumes. The parties reach for lawyers because that's the only path they know, and once they do, the matter gets translated into the language of claims and defenses and often loses sight of what both sides actually need in order to move forward. A mediator who thinks like a business owner can translate it back. That's not a knock on legal training. It's simply a different kind of expertise, and for a whole category of disputes it may be the more relevant one.
Let me be clear about what that expertise is for, though, because it's easy to misread. A mediator's job is never to tell the parties what to do, even when you're sure you can see the problem, or the solution. The moment you do that is the moment you've stopped mediating and started dictating. My role is to act as an intermediary and a guide: to help two parties understand each other, weigh their own options, and reach a decision they both agree to, while preserving the relationship wherever possible. Domain knowledge doesn't change that role. It makes me better at it. It lets me ask sharper questions, recognize what's really driving the impasse, and steer the conversation toward common ground, while leaving the decision, always, in the hands of the people who must live with it.
An Untouched Opportunity
Which brings me to the opportunity I most want this community to see. Business-to-business mediation is ripe for the picking. Most business owners have no idea that mediation is even an option. I owned two businesses for more than 15 years before I learned mediation existed, and I'd already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation that could have been avoided. A lot of owners come to feel that the only person winning a long lawsuit is the lawyer.
Think about what a business owner faces today when a dispute arises. First comes the pit-in-the-stomach feeling that you're going to have to “lawyer up.” Then the questions: How much will this cost? How long will it take? What enemies am I about to make? Now imagine that same owner learning there's another way: that they could pay a fraction of what litigation costs, often a fixed fee rather than an open-ended meter; that the matter could be resolved in a day, or a handful of days, instead of years; and that they could keep the relationship intact, because the dispute is handled face to face, in a room built for agreement rather than across a courtroom through opposing counsel.
Money saved. Time saved. Relationships saved. Once you lay it out that way, the real question isn't why a business owner would choose mediation — it's why so few of them do. The answer is simple: no one has told them it's an option. That's a failure of awareness, and it's one this profession is uniquely positioned to fix. Educate business owners on what mediation offers, and they will line up at the door.
A Rallying Cry, Not a Complaint
To my fellow non-attorney mediators: your background is not a deficiency to apologize for. It's an asset the profession has barely begun to recognize. The years you spent in your industry, building, failing, negotiating, reading people from across the table, are exactly the years that prepare someone to resolve disputes in that industry. Don't be discouraged when you're told the work belongs to someone else. I've been told more than once that I'd have a hard time in this field because I'm not an attorney. It hasn't deterred me, because I know what I bring to the table, and so do the parties who leave it with an agreement.
To the institutions: broadening the panel isn't charity, and it isn't a lowering of standards. It's how this profession grows into the enormous, unserved market sitting right in front of it. The business owners who need us don't yet know we exist. Let's build a profession diverse enough, in training, in experience, in perspective, to go out and reach them.
A mediator's job is not to know the law better than anyone in the room. It's to understand the problem better than anyone in the room, and to help the people who own that problem solve it themselves — it's an art. Plenty of us are ready to do exactly that. So, here's what I want every non-attorney mediator to hear: we would gladly take a seat at the mediation table. But if there isn't one for us, we won't stand in the doorway waiting to be invited in. We'll build our own table, and we're more than capable of filling every chair around it ourselves.
Big firms: help me help you. There are many mediators like me. Every week I talk to capable people who wish they could mediate the kinds of cases their business and life experience prepared them for. Why aren't they? Imagine a roster so diverse it could handle any problem that came its way. Imagine what that would mean for the people we serve, who will truly value having someone who has walked in their shoes help guide them to a solution.
Article summary
Most business disputes are business problems, not legal ones, yet mediation has quietly defaulted to the law degree as its single credential. Drawing on his own path into the field, Luke Taylor argues that mediators who come from business, medicine, engineering, and other domains bring exactly the expertise many disputes need. He makes the case that broadening the panel is not a lowering of standards but the key to reaching an enormous, underserved market.
Author Bio
Luke Taylor is a mediator and the owner of real estate and lending businesses, with more than 15 years of entrepreneurial experience. He serves on the mediation panels of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and has mediated more than 100 cases in the New York courts. This article draws on his own experiences as a non-attorney mediator.
Email: luke@crowdcopia.com