Arbitration

Mr. Lachenmeier has served for more than 20 years as both a court-appointed arbitrator and as a privately selected arbitrator in a wide variety of cases. I believe that the proper measuring stick for making an arbitration award is to try hard to figure out what a local Circuit Court jury would do if presented with the same facts. By my definition, a reasonable jury award is a fair award, whether you represent the plaintiff or the defendant.

Whether serving as a sole arbitrator, or as one of three, I view my job as to lobby for a fair result, regardless of who asks me to serve. I am very comfortable as the swing arbitrator as it fits well with my belief that arbitrators should vote their beliefs rather than take sides based solely on who appointed them.

Because of the breadth of my experience I have likely had some prior experience with most kinds of cases you will encounter.

I believe in very carefully listening to everyone, increasing the likelihood all participants will feel heard. Then dispensing what I believe to be justice, regardless of who selected me.

Online Arbitrations

Most of the online issues in arbitration are similar to those in mediation and I direct you to my Guidelines for Online Mediation and my Best Practices for Online Mediation. There are, of course, significant differences. One is that arbitrations, including those that the court mandated, are theoretically open to the public and clearly different confidentiality and privacy issues exist and are not nearly as protected in arbitration as they are in mediation. In the case of UM or UIM arbitrations, Mr. Lachenmeier believes it is appropriate to set ground rules at the very beginning, particularly as it relates to excluding from arbitrator consideration, policy limits, PIP or other offsets and similar issues. Nonetheless, it is often preferable to do arbitrations online and Mr. Lachenmeier has been trained in extensive use of Zoom as the online platform.